ft; 


THECONTINUtTYOFCHRISTtAN  THOUGHT. 
A  Study  of  Modern  Theology  in  the  Light  of  its 
History.  i2mo,  gilt  top,  $2.00. 

JONATHAN  EDWARDS.  In  American  Reli- 
gious Leaders  Series.  i6mo,  gilt  top,  $1.25. 

RELIGIOUS    PROGRESS.     i6mo,  $1.00. 

HOUGHTON,  MIFFLIN  &  CO. 
BOSTON  AND  NEW  YORK. 


RELIGIOUS    PROGRESS 


BY 


ALEXANDER  V.  G.  ALLEN 

PROFESSOR   IN    THE    EPISCOPAL   THEOLOGICAL   SCHOOL 
IN   CAMBRIDGE 


WITHDRAWN  FROM 
UNIVERSITY  OF  REDLANDS  LIBRARY 


BOSTON  AND    NEW  YORK 
HOUGHTON,  MIFFLIN   AND  COMPANY 


JAN2'341911 


/H1 


Copyright,  1894, 
BY  ALEXANDER  V.  G.  ALLEN. 

All  rights  reserved. 


The  Riverside  Press,  Cambridge,  Mass.,  U.S.A. 
Electrotyped  and  Printed  by  H.  O.  Houghton  &  Co. 


READ    BEFORE   THE    DIVINITY   SCHOOL  OF  YALE 

UNIVERSITY,   IN    MARCH,    1894 

ARE  DEDICATED  TO 

ELIZABETH   KENT  ALLEN 

f  OCTOBER    14,    1892 

IN   GRATEFUL   AND   SACRED 

AND    EVERLASTING    REMEMBRANCE 


QUONIAM  APUD  TE  EST 
FONS  VITJE  ;  ET  IN  LUMINE 
TUO  VIDEBIMUS  LUMEN 


M124270 


CONTENTS. 

FIRST   LECTURE. 

RELIGIOUS     PROGRESS     IN    THE    EXPERIENCE  OF 
THE    INDIVIDUAL. 

PAGE 

I.   DEFINITION  OF  PROGRESS 9 

II.  WHETHER  PROGRESS  IN  RELIGION  is  POS- 
SIBLE     24 

III.  THE  METHOD  OF  GROWTH  BY  REACTION    .  33 

IV.  THE  THEORY  OF  A  UNIFORM  DEVELOPMENT  43 
V.  THE  CONCEPTION  OF  PROGRESS  IMPLIED  IN 

CONSERVATISM 56 

SECOND    LECTURE. 

RELIGIOUS    PROGRESS    IN   THE  ORGANIC    LIFE  OF 
THE    CHURCH. 

I.  AN  ILLUSTRATION  OF  PROGRESS  IN  THE 
CATHOLIC  CHURCH  OF  THE  EARLY  CEN- 
TURIES   78 

II.  THE    RECONCILIATION    OF    HOSTILE  ATTI- 
TUDES IN  THEOLOGY 89 

III.  THE  APPEAL  TO  THE  PAST  IN  ALL  PROGRES- 

SIVE MOVEMENTS  IN  THE  CHURCH  .    .    .112 

IV.  CONCLUSION 132 


RELIGIOUS    PROGRESS. 


Nihil  sub  sole  novum,  nee  valet  quisquam  dicere :  Ecce  hoc 
recens  est.  ECCLES.  i.  10. 

Haec  dicit  Dominus :  State  super  vias  et  videte  et  interro- 
gate de  semitis  antiquis,  quae  sit  via  bona  et  ambulate  in  ea. 
JER.  vi.  1 6. 

Et  dixit  qui  sedebat  in  throno:  Ecce  nova  facio  omnia. 
REV.  xxi.  5. 


RELIGIOUS    PROGRESS. 


i. 

In  the  Experience  of  the  Individual. 

I. 

IENTLEMEN  :  I  should  like  to  ex- 
press to  you  the  pleasure  it  gives 
me  to  be  here,  how  it  is  at  once  a 
privilege  and  an  honor  to  stand  before  you 
in  this  ancient  institution.  More  than  any 
other  college  or  university,  Yale  has  been 
the  nursing-mother  of  great  theologians. 
There  is,  first  of  all,  Jonathan  Edwards, 
who  deserves  the  rank  which  has  been  as- 
signed him  by  his  admirers,  as  one  of  the 
greatest  as  well  as  one  of  the  best  of  the 
sons  of  men,  to  whose  theology  full  justice 
has  not  yet  been  done,  to  which  we  may 
yet  return  for  inspiration  and  guidance 


io  Religious  Progress. 

when  we  are  able  to  shut  our  eyes,  as  we 
may  properly  do,  to  his  Inferno,  for  it  was 
but  the  negative  side  of  his  thought,  by 
means  of  which,  and  in  comparison  with 
which,  his  lofty  conceptions  of  God  and 
man  stand  out  in  strong  relief.  There  is 
Dr.  Samuel  Hopkins,  with  his  seemingly 
hard  message  of  disinterested  submission, 
which,  when  rightly  understood,  bears 
high  testimony  to  the  divine  dignity  and 
capacity  of  human  nature,  to  his  own  no- 
bility of  character  as  well.  Dr.  Emmons 
was  the  author  of  a  most  extraordinary 
theology,  a  system  of  sheer  unqualified 
pantheism,  in  which  the  intensity  of  a 
tropical  sun,  shining  in  the  noonday, 
threatened  to  extinguish  with  its  intense 
heat  and  brilliancy  all  lower  forms  of  life, 
— a  theology  preached  with  a  living  fire 
which  still  burns  in  his  sermons,  a  man 
who  surely  ought  to  come  up  again  for  a 
rehearing.  Dr.  Dwight  was  more  moder- 
ate and  less  eccentric,  developing  a  theo- 
logical system  in  his  sermons  before  the 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.       1 1 

students,  upon  which  in  those  trying  times 
men  could  rest  and  build.  There  was  Dr. 
Taylor,  who  led  the  way  out  of  the  diffi- 
culties which  then  beset  the  doctrine  of 
original  sin.  Dr.  Bushnell  had  a  creative 
mind  of  a  high  order,  striking  out  a  path 
of  his  own,  an  innovator,  indeed,  turning 
the  mind  of  the  churches  into  new  direc- 
tions, in  order  that  they  might  escape  the 
wearisome  confusion  bred  by  the  old  con- 
troversies, and  yet  aware  also  that  the  full 
significance  of  the  old  doctrines  had  not 
been  measured.  If  he  did  not  always  solve 
the  issues  which  he  raised,  yet  he  never 
failed  to  shed  light  upon  them,  revealing 
by  his  personal  disclosure  of  his  own  re- 
ligious need  the  positive  directions  which 
theology  must  take.  And  one  other,  also, 
deserves  to  be  mentioned  in  the  same 
honored  list,  the  late  Elisha  Mulford,  who 
aimed  to  combine  the  old  with  the  new 
in  living  relationship,  to  whom  the  Nicene 
Creed  repeated  the  last  and  highest  utter- 
ance of  the  New  Theology,  who  was  true 


12  Religious  Progress. 

to  his  Puritan  antecedents  when  he  saw 
in  the  Nation  the  Republic  of  God. 

These  men,  all  of  them,  and  each  in  his 
own  way,  labored  for  the  advancement  of 
theology  as  a  science.  Whatever  we  may 
think  of  their  work,  or  whether  we  think 
of  it  at  all,  they  were  possessed  by  one 
common  conviction,  that  the  knowledge  of 
God,  the  most  elemental  and  fundamental 
of  all  knowledge,  was  capable  of  growth  ; 
that  theology  as  a  science  admitted  of 
improvement  and  expansion.  In  speaking 
to  you  on  the  subject  of  religious  progress, 
I  am  not  out  of  harmony  with  this  long 
and  honored  descent  of  your  own  divines. 

When  I  was  invited  to  deliver  these  lec- 
tures, I  was  reminded  by  Dr.  Fisher  that 
Phillips  Brooks  had  been  in  the  habit  of 
coming  here  to  address  you.  I  cannot 
hope  to  find  you  as  he  would  have  done, 
and  yet  I  have  the  assurance  that  the 
thought  I  seek  to  express  would  have  met 
his  approval.  He  believed  in  progress 
with  an  earnestness  of  conviction  which 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.       13 

few  men  can  rival, — -it  might  almost  be 
called  an  article  of  his  creed.  Out  of  his 
many  expressions  on  the  subject,  let  me 
quote  these  two  characteristic  utterances  : 

"  It  would  be  intolerable  to  us,  if  we  could 
not  trace  tendencies  in  our  life.  If  everything 
stood  still,  or  if  things  moved  only  in  a  circle, 
it  would  be  a  dreadful  thing  to  live.  But  we 
rejoice  in  life,  because  it  seems  to  be  carrying 
us  somewhere,  because  its  darkness  seems  to 
be  rolling  on  towards  light,  and  even  its  pain 
to  be  moving  onward  to  a  hidden  joy.  We 
bear  with  incompleteness,  because  of  the  com- 
pletion which  is  prophesied  and  hoped  for." 

"  Christianity  is  one  and  everlasting.  Its 
work  of  salvation  for  man's  soul  is  the  same 
blessed  work  forever.  But  its  relation  to  the 
world's  life  at  large  must  be  forever  changing 
with  the  changes  of  that  world's  needs  and 
seekings.  The  larger  applications  of  Christi- 
anity must  of  necessity  be  readjusted,  and  in 
their  readjustments,  its  power  may  be  tempo- 
rarily obscured  or  unrecognized  as  it  passes 
into  new  forms  of  exhibition." 


1 4  Religious  Progress. 

In  his  devotion  to  progress  as  a  princi- 
ple, necessary  to  the  symmetry  and  com- 
pleteness of  our  spiritual  consciousness, 
Phillips  Brooks  was  a  child  of  his  age. 
For  if  there  is  one  conviction,  or  any  one 
word,  which  more  than  another  is  charac- 
teristic of  the  nineteenth  century,  it  is 
progress.  It  was  not  the  custom  of  other 
ages  to  talk  of  progress  as  we  do  to-day,  as 
if  it  were  the  motive  and  the  test  of  life, 
to  be  applied  to  all  our  institutions  and 
usages  whether  in  church  or  state.  In 
other  ages  and  even  down  to  the  close  of 
the  last  century,  the  past  was  for  the  most 
part  regarded  as  greater  than  the  present, 
as  if  in  the  nature  of  the  case,  the  fathers 
knew  more  or  had  done  greater  things 
than  their  degenerate  descendants.  They 
carried  a  heavier  spear  or  wore  a  larger 
armor  than  their  children.  The  problems 
which  the  great  thinkers  of  distant  ages 
had  been  unable  to  solve,  it  was  presump- 
tion for  their  posterity  to  attempt  to  solve. 
All  this  has  been  changed  and  even  re- 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.       15 

versed  by  our  conception  of  progress.  It 
is  as  though  we  had  crossed  some  invisible 
line,  by  which  our  outlook  upon  the  world 
had  been  modified.  Our  faces  are  now 
set  as  if  we  would  explore  a  territory  hith- 
erto unknown,  or  sound  some  greater 
depth  in  the  mystery  of  existence.  There 
has  been  something  in  the  air,  or  in  the 
souls  of  men,  in  this  modern  day,  a  jubi- 
lance and  expectation,  as  if  we  had  at  last 
learned  how  to  live,  as  if  it  were  in  our 
power  to  bring  in  the  millennial  age ;  as  if 
all  things  were  now  possible  to  him  that 
believed. 

The  word  progress  is  one  of  those  great 
words,  summaries  of  a  people's  philosophy, 
which  we  use  the  more  freely  just  because 
we  take  it  for  granted  and  do  not  think  to 
define  it.  Its  power  as  a  word  is  all  the 
greater  because  its  meaning  is  vague  or 
indeterminable;  indeed,  in  its  vagueness  \ 
consists  its  power.  In  the  days  when  tran- 
scendentalism was  in  vogue  in  New  Eng- 
land, its  disciples  were  fond  of  asking  for 


1 6  Religious  Progress. 

a  definition  of  life,  but  the  strange  unintel- 
ligible jargon  of  the  many  ambitious  an- 
swers showed  that  the  expression  was 
indefinable.  So  it  is  with  progress  ;  or  to 
adopt  the  words  of  St.  Augustine  which 
he  used  concerning  the  knowledge  of  God, 
we  know  what  it  is,  if  we  are  not  asked  to 
tell  what  it  is,  but  if  we  are  asked  to  tell 
what  it  is  we  do  not  know  what  it  is.  But 
we  believe  in  it  even  though  we  are  at  a 
loss  to  define  it,  and  our  best  reason  for 
our  belief  is  that  we  do  believe.  We  some- 
times argue  that  if  one  will  take  in  the  long 
range  of  the  centuries,  or  compare  our  own 
time  with  the  world  of  the  Middle  Ages, 
there  is  evidence  enough  of  the  progress 
of  humanity.  But  this  evidence  appeals 
only  to  scholars  and  students  of  history, 
even  if  it  were  wholly  satisfactory  ;  while 
the  conviction  of  progress  is  a  great  popu- 
lar belief  or  enthusiasm,  which  has  not 
been  caught  from  scholars,  nor  been  gene- 
rated by  any  elaborate  retrospect  or  com- 
parison. It  is  rather  because  we  are  look- 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.       77 

ing  forward  to  some  higher  attainment 
than  the  present,  that  we  believe  in  prog- 
ress, because  we  are  stirred  by  some 
divine  unrest,  or  have  had  vouchsafed  to 
us  some  vision,  or  as  if  some  special  reve- 
lation of  the  things  which  need  to  be  done, 
which  can  be  done,  for  the  perfecting  of 
the  life  of  man.  Whatever  may  be  the  true 
ground  of  our  conviction,  it  has  come  about 
that  the  world's  life  and  progress  are  al- 
most one  in  their  meaning,  they  are  used 
interchangeably  as  if  they  were  synonyms. 
If  we  have  learned  from  the  past,  we  have 
also  learned  from  our  own  experience,  that 
ideals  cannot  be  destroyed,  that  they  have 
a  tendency  to  persist  and  enforce  their 
claim,  a  tendency  to  fulfillment  even  though 
we  never  witness  their  full  realization. 

Tennyson  still  remains,  after  all,  the 
most  representative  voice  of  this  convic- 
tion, so  that  his  words  lose  nothing  by 
their  familiarity.  It  is  the  argument  from 
the  indestructibility  of  the  ideal,  which 
evokes  enthusiasm  :  — 


1 8  Religious  Progress. 

"  Men,   my  brothers,   men  the   workers,   ever   reaping 

something  new: 
That  which  they  have  done  but  earnest  of  the  things  that 

they  shall  do: 

For  I  dipt  into  the  future,  far  as  human  eye  could  see, 
Saw  the  Vision  of  the  world,  and  all  the  wonder  that 

should  be." 

The  poet  was  impressed  by  the  circum- 
stance that  change  —  change  in  itself  and 
almost  for  its  own  sake  —  is  the  evidence 
that  we  are  in  motion  toward  some  greater 
good  ;  that  the  old  order  requires  to  be 
changed  if  it  would  stand  the  test  of  prog- 
ress, whether  in  its  institutions,  its  doc- 
trine, creed,  or  cultus,  civil  or  social  ar- 
rangements. It  is  like  a  journey  where 
we  know  that  we  are  advancing  to  our 
goal,  because  the  scene  is  always  changing, 
each  moment  disclosing  something  new. 
If  the  scene  remained  the  same  or  were 
repeated  at  intervals,  we  should  infer  that 
we  were  standing  still  or  moving  in  a  cir- 
cle. Whether  the  change  means  anything 
better  in  the  immediate  present,  or  whether 
it  is  an  improvement  in  itself,  is  not  the 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.       19 

question.  The  point  is  that  we  accept  the 
change  because  it  is  change,  and  because 
of  the  larger  trust  in  some  distant  good 
which  beckons  us  onward,  as  if  this  faith 
were  the  substance  of  things  hoped  for  and 
the  evidence  of  things  not  seen. 

If  we  have  any  misgivings  about  the 
reality  beneath  the  change,  the  same  poet 
has  expressed  them  for  us.  There  were 
moments  in  his  experience  when  order  fes- 
tered and  things  seemed  out  of  joint.  He 
became  tired  of  modern  civilization,  till  he 
even  longed  for  quiet  and  rest  in  some 
spot  which  no  intellectual  or  scientific  ac- 
tivity could  penetrate,  where  commerce 
was  unknown, — the  low  range  of  savage 
existence.  He  saw  that  the  increase  of 
knowledge  was  not  followed  by  the  in- 
crease of  true  wisdom,  which  still  lingered 
in  the  rear ;  he  feared  that  the  individ- 
ual might  wither,  for  the  sacrifice  of  his 
interests  was  threatened  by  this  mighty 
movement,  which  only  contemplated  the 
good  of  the  whole.  It  might  be  that 


20  Religious  Progress. 

the  steamship,  the  railway  —  the  thoughts 
that  shake  mankind  —  were  not,  after  all, 
contributing  to  true  happiness.  But  out 
of  this  skepticism  or  depression  he  rallied 
in  the  name  of  progress,  and  as  the  heir 
of  all  the  ages  :  — 

"Not  in  vain  the  distance  beacons.    Forward,  forward 

let  us  range. 
Let  the    great  world  spin  forever   down    the   ringing 

grooves  of  change. 
Through   the  shadow  of  the  globe,  we  sweep  into  the 

younger  day  : 
Better  fifty  years  of  Europe  than  a  cycle  of  Cathay." 

There  were  sensitive  souls  in  the  early 
years  of  this  century  who  felt  the  chill  as 
they  passed  through  the  shadow  of  the 
globe,  when,  to  the  ardent  emotions  bred 
by  the  passionate  belief  in  human  perfecti- 
bility, there  succeeded  a  collapse  of  hope. 
Wordsworth  was  one  of  those  who,  having 
shared  in  the  thrilling  expectancy  of  the 
hour,  experienced  the  sad  mood  of  the  re- 
action, and  yet  without  yielding  his  faith 
in  progress.  In  his  mature  years,  at  the 
age  of  forty,  he  spoke  of  "  the  heart -cheer- 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.       2 1 

ing  belief  in  the  perpetual  progress  of  the 
species  towards  a  point  of  unattainable  per- 
fection." When  we  seek  for  the  grounds 
of  his  conviction,  it  appears  as  if  a  first 
principle,  or  as  some  intuitive  idea,  for 
which  no  evidence  is  forthcoming,  in  which 
one  ought  to  trust,  despite  all  appearances 
to  the  contrary.  "  Let  us  allow  and  be- 
lieve," so  he  writes  in  1809,  "  that  there  is 
a  progress  in  the  species  towards  an  unat- 
tainable perfection,  or,  whether  this  be  so 
or  not,  that  it  is  a  necessity  of  a  good  and 
greatly  gifted  nature  to  believe  it."  He 
meets  the  objections  which  he  felt,  and  the 
skepticism  in  his  own  soul,  by  dwelling  on 
the  thought  that  progress  is  not  neces- 
sarily constant,  either  in  virtue  or  intel- 
lectual qualities,  or  in  the  most  valuable 
indispensable  department  of  knowledge. 
"  The  progress  of  the  species  is  not  like 
a  Roman  road  which  goes  straight  to  its 
goal,  but  rather  like  a  winding  river,  fre- 
quently forced  to  turn  backward  in  order 
to  overcome  obstacles  which  cannot  be 


22  Religious  Progress. 

directly  eluded,  but  always  moving  with 
an  additional  impulse,  conquering  in  secret 
great  difficulties,  and,  whether  we  can  trace 
it  or  not,  gaining  strength  every  hour  for 
the  accomplishment  of  its  destiny." 

The  faith  of  Wordsworth  in  human 
progress  possesses  the  greater  significance 
because  he  lived  through  an  age  of  depres- 
sion and  of  reaction  engendered  by  the 
failure  of  the  French  Revolution,  when, 
despite  all  that  tended  to  doubt  and  dis- 
couragement, he  maintained  his  faith  un- 
shaken. He  lived  to  see  that  faith  become 
the  inspiring  motive  in  every  department 
of  human  activity.  I  will  not  even  at- 
tempt to  enumerate  the  rich  and  varied 
results  of  progress  which  go  to  make  our 
modern  civilization  in  the  political  or  social 
or  industrial  order,  the  improvements  in 
methods  of  education,  the  discoveries  of 
science,  the  new  branches  of  inquiry  which 
are  so  full  of  promise  for  the  future,  —  all 
of  which  make  the  nineteenth  century  the 
most  memorable,  because  the  most  pro- 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.       23 

gressive  age  in  the  world's  history.  Nor 
in  these  later  years  has  there  been  any 
relaxation  of  effort  in  order  to  the  aboli- 
tion of  old  abuses  or  the  bringing  in  of 
better  ways ;  but  rather  as  time  has  ad- 
vanced has  the  conviction  spread  and  deep- 
ened that  still  greater  changes  are  needed, 
to  which  the  race  of  man  is  equal,  to  which 
it  is  pledged  and  consecrated  by  its  faith 
in  progress.  Hence  we  labor,  as  if  all  sin 
and  suffering  and  evil  could  be  overcome 
and  banished  if  only  right  methods  could 
be  made  to  prevail.  There  has  been  so 
much  encouragement  in  what  has  been  ac- 
complished that  many  begin  to  feel  as  if 
we  were  on  the  threshold  of  still  greater 
discoveries  ;  that  as  yet  only  the  basis  has 
been  laid  for  some  higher  civilization,  of 
whose  beneficence  we  can  form  no  ade- 
quate conception. 


24  Religious  Progress. 

n. 

But  the  popular  belief  in  progress  does 
not  go  unchallenged.  There  are  grave 
doubts  as  to  its  reality,  misgivings,  deep 
questionings  in  the  minds  of  those  who 
seek  to  analyze  the  constituents  of  the 
problem  of  human  life.  There  are  many 
who  turn  away  in  weariness  from  the  noisy 
declamation  which  magnifies  in  grandilo- 
quent words  the  progress  of  the  age,  who 
doubt  whether  every  change  is  an  improve- 
ment, who  recognize  that  our  complicated 
civilization  involves  greater  evils  than  the 
simpler  forms  of  earlier  ages,  who  discern 
dark  portents  in  the  future,  from  which 
they  see  no  means  of  escape.  There  are 
others  who  have  had  to  fight  their  way 
through  the  pessimism  of  Schopenhauer, 
and,  if  they  have  escaped  his  conclusion, 
yet  feel  the  soreness  of  the  struggle 
through  which  they  have  passed,  so  that 
their  optimism,  their  hope  for  the  future 
of  mankind,  is  more  sober  and  subdued. 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.       25 

The  speculative  difficulties  which  embar- 
rass thoughtful  minds  as  they  reflect  on 
the  nature  of  progress  come  to  a  focus,  as 
it  were,  in  the  sphere  of  religion ;  for  the- 
ology alone  professes  to  enlighten  us  on 
the  whence  and  the  whither,  to  reveal  with 
authority  the  laws  which  ought  to  govern 
conduct,  and  to  initiate  us  into  the  methods 
by  which  humanity  shall  fulfill  its  calling. 
But  the  picture  which  the  religious  world 
presents  is  not  altogether  clear  or  encour- 
aging. Does  the  Church  gain  an  increas- 
ing light  into  the  nature  of  God  and  his 
relations  to  men  ?  Does  it  prosecute  its 
work  with  increasing  success  ?  How  far 
does  the  cultivation  of  morality  and  holy 
character,  and  the  spirit  of  brotherly  love 
keep  pace  with  the  advances  of  material 
civilization  ?  Do  erroneous  views  and  su- 
perstitions tend  to  disappear  ?  And  if  unity 
is  the  badge  of  a  well-established  science, 
how  far  does  theology  merit  recognition 
as  a  science,  in  view  of  the  wide  variety 
of  opinion  in  the  religious  world  ? 


26  Religious  Progress. 

To  questions  like  these  different  an- 
swers will  be  returned.  However  hopeful 
may  be  our  attitude,  yet  as  we  scan  the 
horizon  in  search  of  evidence  for  religious 
progress,  we  are  forced  to  confess  that 
there  is  much  which  seems  to  contradict 
our  hope.  The  old  errors  still  exist  and 
show  no  traces  of  weakness,  but,  on  the 
contrary,  they  seem  to  have  taken  a  new 
lease  of  life.  In  some  respects  a  retro- 
grade tendency  appears,  as  in  the  re- 
version, in  our  own  day,  to  theories  of 
Christian  certitude  or  defences  of  the 
faith,  which  learning  and  scholarship  unite 
in  rejecting  as  untenable.  Even  religious 
persecution  has  not  wholly  passed  away, 
and  though  its  forms  may  have  changed, 
yet  the  religious  conflicts  of'  the  present, 
the  ostracism  of  good  men  for  heresy,  still 
remind  us  of  an  age  which  we  had  fondly 
thought  to  have  disappeared,  never  to 
return. 

It  was  this  feature  of  the  religious  world 
which  led  Macaulay  to  deny  that  any  prog- 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.      27 

ress  could  be  traced  in  religious  history. 
The  familiar  essay  in  which  he  gave  utter- 
ance to  this  conviction  was  written  in  1840, 
not  far  from  the  time  when  Tennyson 
wrote  his  "  Locksley  Hall."  Macaulay 
had  been  browsing  over  Ranke's  "  His- 
tory of  the  Popes "  till  his  mind  was  so 
powerfully  impressed  with  the  long  dura- 
tion of  the  papacy,  and  not  only  with  its 
duration  but  with  its  dominion,  which 
seemed  to  him  still  unshaken,  that  he  was 
led  to  utter  the  depressing  prophecy  which 
has  afforded  such  comfort  to  our  Roman 
Catholic  brethren,  —  that  their  Church 
might  be  destined  to  witness  the  end  of 
all  other  forms  of  Christian  organization  : 
"  She  may  exist  in  undiminished  vigor 
when  some  traveler  from  New  Zealand  j 
shall  in  the  midst  of  a  vast  solitude  take 
his  stand  upon  London  Bridge  to  sketch 
the  ruins  of  St.  Paul's." 

Macaulay  did  not  form  this  opinion  with- 
out some  evidence,  or  at  least  some  show 
of  reasoning.  He  pointed  out  that  there 


28  Religious  Progress. 

are  branches  of  knowledge  with  respect  to 
which  the  law  of  the  human  mind  is  prog- 
ress. In  mathematics,  and  in  the  experi- 
mental sciences,  what  was  once  acquired 
could  not  again  be  lost,  for  people,  as  he 
remarks,  do  not  react  against  established 
scientific  theorems,  such  as  Harvey's  doc- 
trine of  the  circulation  of  the  blood.  But 
with  regard  to  religion,  the  case,  he  says, 
is  different.  Socrates  knew  as  much  of 
natural  theology  as  Paley,  and  was  just  as 
well  circumstanced  for  knowing  all  that 
was  to  be  known  ;  in  the  Book  of  Job, 
they  talked  with  as  much  skill  about  the 
problems  of  life  as  they  do  to-day.  Re- 
vealed religion  also,  he  thought,  no  more 
than  natural  religion,  could  be  called  a  pro- 
gressive science.  A  Christian  of  the  fifth 
century,  with  a  Bible  in  his  hands,  other 
things  being  equal,  is  on  a  par  with  a 
Christian  of  our  own  day ;  the  discov- 
eries of  civilization  have  no  bearing  what- 
ever on  religious  doctrines ;  there  was 
Sir  Thomas  More,  who  went  back  to  the 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.       29 

belief  in  transubstantiation,  when  all  the 
world  was  rejecting  it,  and  he  was  a  man  of 
eminent  talent ;  no  learning  or  sagacity 
affords  security  against  the  greatest  errors) 
on  religious  subjects  ;  Bayle  and  Chilling- 
worth  became  Roman  Catholics  from  sin- 
cere conviction  ;  and  the  great  Dr.  Johnson 
was  a  believer  in  miracles  and  apparitions. 
"For  these  reasons,"  he  exclaims,  "we 
have  ceased  to  wonder  at  any  vagaries  of 
superstition.  .  .  .  During  the  last  seven 
centuries  the  public  mind  of  Europe  has 
made  constant  progress  in  almost  every 
department  of  secular  knowledge.  But  in 
religion  we  can  trace  no  constant  prog- 
ress. The  ecclesiastical  history  of  that 
long  period  is  the  history  of  movement  to 
and  fro." 

The  judgment  of  Macaulay,  even  if  su- 
perficial or  erroneous,  like  so  many  other 
conclusions  which  he  reached,  has  still  a 
representative  character.  Numerous  illus- 
trations could  be  adduced  in  our  own 
experience  to  confirm  the  line  of  argu- 


jo  Religious  Progress. 

ment  which  he  adopted.  The  nineteenth 
century  abounds  in  these  instances  of  re- 
version to  old  errors,  to  what  were  sup- 
posed to  be  extinct  beliefs.  The  old 
heresies  have  a  singular  way  of  reappear- 
ing, so  that  there  is  hardly  any  religious 
conviction  of  the  past  which  does  not  still 
find  credence.  One  often  hears  among  the 
clergy  the  same  melancholy  conclusion  that 
progress  is  not  the  law  of  the  religious 
world.  Isolated  as  they  too  generally  are 
from  the  world  of  thought,  preoccupied 
supremely  with  the  practical  interests  of 
their  profession,  hearing  at  a  distance  the 
confused  rumbling  of  a  world's  commotion, 
they  come  wearily  to  the  conclusion  that 
the  old  errors  obey  a  certain  law  of  perio- 
dicity, the  old  heresies  are  doomed  ever 
and  anon  to  reappear,  as  though  we  were 
treading  in  an  endless  circle. 

And  again,  Macaulay  was  right,  to  a  cer- 
tain extent,  in  feeling  that  there  was  some 
difference  between  the  spheres  of  religion 
and  of  material  civilization,  so  that  the 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.      31 

same  law  did  not  prevail  alike  in  both. 
He  did  not  see  wherein  the  difference  lay, 
but  rather  blindly  assumed  that  because 
religion  did  not  follow  the  method  of  prog- 
ress in  the  natural  sciences,  therefore  the 
law  of  progress  did  not  apply  to  religious 
knowledge.  Many  others  have  drawn  the 
same  conclusion  from  the  same  premises. 
The  brilliant  results  achieved  in  the  posi- 
tive sciences,  the  firm  step,  the  forward 
movement  from  one  point  in  advance  to 
another,  the  security  of  attainment  be- 
yond the  power  of  modification  by  per- 
sonal taste  or  preferences,  —  these  things 
afford  a  striking  contrast  to  the  religious 
situation,  which,  to  the  gaze  from  without, 
resembles  a  seething  confusion  of  contra- 
dictory opinions,  where  no  opinion  is  in 
the  nature  of  the  case  absurd,  and  all 
opinions  are  alike  lacking  in  the  authority 
of  demonstrated  truth. 

In  speaking  to  you  on  the  subject  of  reli- 
gious progress,  I  have  no  theory  to  advo- 
cate, nor  am  I  so  presumptuous  as  to  think 


32  Religious  Progress. 

of  demonstrating  the  existence  of  any  law 
or  method  under  whose  uniform  operation 
the  phenomena  of  religion  are  included. 
There  are  many  attempts  at  a  philosophy 
of  history,  each  of  which  may  have  its  pe- 
culiar merits,  contributing  something  to 
our  knowledge  of  the  ways  of  the  Spirit  in 
the  life  of  humanity,  while  yet  no  one  of 
them  nor  all  taken  together  are  adequate 
to  the  solution  of  the  mysterious  problem 
of  the  spiritual  life.  I  do  not  intend  to 
add  another  to  these  many  efforts  to  ex- 
plain the  genesis  of  religion,  or  the  method 
of  its  growth,  but  shall  be  content  with 
the  more  modest  task  of  calling  attention 
to  certain  demonstrated  tendencies  in  reli- 
gious thought  or  experience,  which  may 
throw  some  light  on  the  situation  of  the 
religious  world,  when  they  are  viewed  to- 
gether as  parts  of  a  larger  whole.  In 
this  first  lecture  I  propose  to  treat  the 
subject  of  religious  progress  in  its  rela- 
tions to  the  individual  man,  to  trace  the 
ruling  ideas  or  motives  in  accordance  with 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.       33 

which  men  act  in  the  present  as  they  have 
in  the  past,  —  methods  with  whose  work- 
ings we  ourselves  are  familiar,  for  we,  too, 
have  followed  them  in  our  own  religious 
development.  In  my  second  lecture  I  shall 
consider  the  subject  of  religious  progress 
as  it  appears  in  the  organized  forms  of 
Christianity,  in  the  Christian  Church  con- 
sidered as  a  whole,  where  other  methods 
prevail,  where  the  individual  contradictions 
are  merged  in  a  larger  unity,  the  orchestra, 
as  it  were,  of  the  religious  life  of  humanity 
where  dissonance  contributes  to  a  richer, 
more  universal  harmony. 

in. 

In  the  life  of  the  individual  there  are 
three  distinct  tendencies,  whose  action, 
whether  separately  or  in  combination,  en- 
ters into  the  vital  movements  of  religious 
thought  and  experience.  We  may  call 
them  tendencies,  forces,  attitudes,  or  mo- 
tives,—  the  name  is  unimportant  if  we  can 
get  some  clear  conception  of  their  nature 


34  Religious  Progress. 

and  operation.  They  take  their  origin  as 
so  many  different  answers  to  the  supreme 
problem  in  religion,  —  how  is  the  past  re- 
lated to  the  present ;  how  is  the  old  truth 
by  which  men  have  lived  in  the  past  re- 
lated to  the  new  truth  which  calls  for  alle- 
giance in  the  present  ? 

The  first  of  these  tendencies  to  which 
I  ask  your  attention  is  the  impulse,  every- 
where and  at  all  times  manifest,  to  reject 
the  old  belief  or  practice  in  order  to  the 
reception  of  some  new  truth.  There  is  a 
certain  order  of  minds  upon  which  truth, 
when  revealed,  seizes  with  irresistible  force, 
impelling  them,  if  they  would  realize  its 
possession,  to  reject  with  vehemence  their 
former  belief,  as  if  the  rejection  of  the  old 
were  indispensable  to  the  acceptation  of 
the  new.  The  process  of  appropriating  the 
new  idea  seems  to  require,  as  if  by  some 
necessary  law  of  the  working  of  the  human 
mind,  this  bitter  antagonism  to  one's  ear- 
lier attitude,  as  if  the  old  neutralized  or 
contradicted  the  new  conviction,  as  if  the 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.      35 

old  must  therefore  be  utterly  false,  —  a 
delusion  from  which  one  must  be  emanci- 
pated at  any  cost.  It  becomes  a  duty  to 
distinguish  sharply  between  the  old  and 
the  new,  while  the  attempt  to  reconcile 
them  seems  like  a  weakness  if  not  a  sin. 
Like  the  pearl  of  great  price,  when  a  man 
becomes  aware  of  its  existence,  he  must 
sell  all  that  he  has  in  order  to  secure  it. 
Only  in  this  way,  when  the  soul,  as  it  were, 
is  swept  clean  and  free  from  its  former 
occupants,  can  the  new  spirit  enter  in  and 
take  possession.  Otherwise  no  footing 
could  be  gained  for  the  new  conception  ; 
it  would  perish  in  the  monotony  of  intel- 
lectual dullness  which  sees  no  differences, 
or  is  incapable  of  drawing  distinctions. 

Those  who  are  acted  upon  in  this  way 
by  the  contact  of  new  truth  may  become 
the  world's  reformers  ;  they  are  the  stuff 
out  of  which  martyrs  are  made  ;  they  would 
gladly  go  to  the  stake  for  their  convictions. 
They  are  not  confused  by  seeing  more 
than  one  side  of  a  question,  —  that  weak- 


36  Religious  Progress. 

ness  which  palsies  so  many  souls  for  ac- 
tion. They  are  often  vigorous  and  power- 
ful spirits  burning  with  the  fires  of  zeal, 
attracting  followers,  becoming  founders  of 
new  sects,  and  making  the  world  different 
from  what  they  found  it. 

Such  is  the  motive  in  the  familiar  pro- 
cess which  we  call  the  storm  and  stress  in 
the  intellectual  and  spiritual  experience  of 
young  men,  —  the  motive  by  which  they 
come  to  the  knowledge  of  themselves,  or 
enter  upon  their  new  inheritance.  There 
is  a  moment  when  what  they  have  been 
taught  or  have  received  in  youth  is  called 
in  question ;  when  they  can  see  only  the 
contrast  and  opposition  between  the  dead 
tradition  of  their  earlier  years  and  the  liv- 
ing freedom  which  the  new  conviction  of- 
fers. The  same  motive  is  revealed,  also, 
in  the  first  instinct  of  a  converted  man, 
leading  him  to  renounce  not  only  what  was 
evil  in  his  old  life,  but  all  its  associations 
as  well,  however  innocent,  to  the  end  that 
he  may  become  a  new  man  in  Christ 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.       37 

Jesus.  Nowhere  is  this  more  effectively 
illustrated  than  in  Bunyan's  "  Pilgrim's 
Progress,"  where  Christian  sets  forth  on  his 
memorable  journey,  leaving  his  home,  his 
wife  and  children,  —  his  whole  world,  —  be- 
hind him,  as  the  indispensable  condition 
of  attaining  a  new  life.  It  was  in  this 
mood  that  so  many  in  the  ancient  church 
condemned  and  rejected  with  abhorrence 
the  old  heathen  world,  —  its  art,  its  litera- 
ture, its  philosophy,  as  well  as  its  immoral 
and  vicious  customs,  —  as  if  all  alike  were 
totally  corrupted,  or  like  salt  which  had  lost 
its  savor.  For  this  reason  St.  Augustine 
was  led,  after  his  conversion,  to  assert  the 
doctrine  of  the  total  depravity  of  human 
nature,  in  order  to  make  more  emphatic 
the  vital  difference  between  the  natural 
man  and  the  soul  which  has  been  renewed 
by  divine  grace  ;  and  again,  to  make  his 
sweeping  condemnation  of  all  heathen  vir- 
tues, as  if  but  splendid  vices. 

It  is  a  peculiarity  of  religious  controver- 
sies  that   they   magnify  distinctions   and 


38  Religious  Progress. 

exaggerate  differences,  to  the  ultimate  ad- 
vantage, it  may  be,  of  the  truth,  but  in  the 
immediate  moment  causing  great  confu- 
sion, while  each  of  the  combating  parties 
proclaims  the  attitude  of  the  other  to  be 
false.  The  late  Dr.  Pusey,  referring  to 
the  teaching  of  his  eminent  contemporary, 
Mr.  Maurice,  declared  that  they  worshiped 
different  Gods.  In  the  bitterness  of  the 
strife  between  Calvinist  and  Arminian  in 
the  last  century,  the  Calvinistic  deity  was 
proclaimed  to  be  identical  with  the  Armin- 
ian devil,  while  to  the  Calvinist  it  seemed 
better  that  the  throne  of  the  universe 
should  be  vacant  than  that  it  should  be 
occupied  by  such  a  pitiful  nonentity  as 
the  Arminians  worshiped. 

In  the  greater  revolutionary  epochs  of 
history,  or  in  moments  when  the  transi- 
tions of  life  are  most  apparent,  in  those 
days  of  the  Lord  which  the  prophet  de- 
clared were  not  days  to  be  prayed  for  or 
desired,  those  men  assume  the  leadership 
who  have  broken  most  violently  with  the 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.       39 

old  and  corrupt  order ;  who  will  make  no 
compromise,  but  insist  on  the  divine  judg- 
ment in  the  destruction  of  the  ancient 
usage  or  institution.  Such  was  Luther, 
though  but  for  a  short  moment  in  his 
career ;  such  was  Calvin  with  his  impla- 
cable hatred  against  Rome  ;  such  was  also 
Knox,  the  most  radical  of  all  the  reformers, 
who  held  that  "  the  Church  of  Rome  was 
not  merely  corrupt,  but  was  abandoned  to 
evil ;  it  was  not  the  church  of  God  but  the 
church  of  the  devil,  and  must  be  wiped 
off  the  face  of  the  earth."  To  these  re- 
formers, in  that  great  hour,  despite  their 
intolerance  and  their  iconoclasm,  the  world 
is  owing,  as  it  also  acknowledges,  a  great 
obligation  ;  for  without  them  the  step 
could  not  have  been  taken  by  which  hu- 
manity advanced  into  freedom  and  light. 
In  these  instances,  and  others  which  might 
be  given,  there  is  a  revelation  of  the  work- 
ings of  the  human  soul,  and  therefore  of 
the  manifestation  of  God  in  history.  He 
taketh  away  the  old  that  he  may  bring  in 
the  new. 


40  Religious  Progress. 

This  method  of  religious  progress  which 
invokes  reaction  as  its  agent  in  the  indi- 
vidual, or  inspires  a  revolution,  when 
adopted  on  a  larger  scale,  must  be  recog- 
nized as  one  of  the  constituent  elements 
of  religious  history  ;  but,  taken  by  itself  as 
the  only  agent  of  reform,  it  has  grave  defi- 
ciencies. It  is  a  violent  method  of  gaining 
a  hearing  or  a  reception  for  new  truth,  or 
of  eliminating  the  evils  and  abuses  of  cus- 
tom grown  hard  by  age  and  precedent. 
When  successful,  it  forces  the  church  to 
compromises  and  readjustments ;  when  it 
fails  it  is  stigmatized  as  heresy  ;  for  heresy, 
if  a  definition  of  the  word  be  possible,  is 
identified  with  the  passionate  advocacy  of 
some  hitherto  unknown  or  unappreciated 
/  aspect  of  the  truth,  generally  coupled  with 
a  denial  of  that  prevailing  view  which 
seems  to  stand  in  the  way  of  its  accept- 
ance. But  heresy  has  had  its  place  and 
function  within  the  church.  It  would  be 
no  unprofitable  chapter  in  the  history  of 
Christian  doctrine,  which  should  consider 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.        41 

the  heresies  by  themselves  in  the  contri- 
butions they  have  made  to  the  fuller  devel- 
opment of  Christian  truth.  In  our  own 
age,  we  may  admit  our  indebtedness  to 
heresy  for  the  original  advocacy  of  the 
great  principle  that  the  Bible  is  to  be  re- 
garded as  literature,  as  written  by  men  of 
like  passions  as  we  are,  though  the  affirma- 
tion was  needlessly  attended  by  the  denial 
of  its  inspiration  or  revelation.  It  was 
heresy  which  first  asserted  the  competence 
and  authority  of  the  human  reason,  while 
the  principle  of  church  authority  was  re- 
jected as  having  no  relation  to  the  reason. 
It  has  advocated  the  sanctity  of  human 
nature,  the  perfect  humanity  of  Christ,  and 
the  doctrine  of  the  divine  unity,  but  with 
the  indignant  denial  of  original  sin  and  the 
truth  of  the  incarnation  and  the  doctrine 
of  the  Trinity.  In  order  to  gain  a  hearing 
for  the  conviction  that  there  is  truth  in 
other  religions  than  the  Christian,  heresy 
has  been  willing  to  deny  that  Christianity 
was  the  absolute  religion.  It  has  forced 


42  Religious  Progress. 

the  religious  world  to  recognize  the  value 
of  scientific  methods  and  results,  but  with 
the  corresponding  negation  of  any  validity 
in  theology  as  a  science.  If  evolution  were 
true,  the  doctrine  of  creation  was  false. 

In  all  these  cases  there  have  been  vio- 
lent commotions  which  have  convulsed 
the  religious  world.  And,  indeed,  this 
method  of  progress  seems  to  imply  that 
the  sphere  of  religion  must  of  necessity  be 
a  theatre  of  constant  agitation  and  conflict, 
just  as  war  has  hitherto  been  regarded  as  a 
necessary  accompaniment  of  an  expanding 
civilization.  Is  there,  then,  no  other  way 
of  religious  progress  by  which  the  read- 
justments that  the  time  demands  may  be 
more  quietly  accomplished,  some  method 
by  which  the  individual  may  grow  into  the 
larger  truth  without  the  indignant  renun- 
ciation of  the  old  faith  ? 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.        43 

IV. 

There  is  another  theory  concerning 
progress,  according  to  which  it  is  con- 
ceived as  a  uniform  movement  forward  and 
upward,  so  that  each  age  prepares  the  way 
for  that  which  follows ;  that  which  comes 
later  in  time  being  for  that  very  reason 
higher,  truer,  more  complete  than  that 
which  preceded  it.  At  no  point  in  the 
process  should  any  violent  break  with  the 
past  be  allowed,  for  the  old  should  grow 
evenly  and  naturally  into  the  new.  There 
was  not  only  a  relative  truth  in  ancient  in- 
stitutions and  doctrines,  but  when  they 
are  superseded  it  is  because  they  have  I 
ministered  to  their  own  displacement,  be- 
cause their  spirit  has  passed  over  into  the 
later  and  larger  institution,  which  conserv- 
ing the  essence  of  the  old  adjusts  it  to  the 
new  environment.  Nor  can  the  old  be 
superseded  until  it  has  done  its  work,  yield-  I 
ing  up  its  vital  truth  to  its  successor. 

Such  was  Pascal's  doctrine  of  the  colos- 


44  Religious  Progress. 

sal  man,  which  I  venture  to  give  in  his 
own  words,  familiar  as  they  are,  and  often 
quoted :  — 

"  The  whole  succession  of  human  beings 
throughout  the  whole  course  of  ages  must  be 
regarded  as  a  single  individual  man,  continu- 
ally living  and  continually  learning.  And  that 
shows  how  unwarranted  is  the  deference  we 
yield  to  the  philosophers  of  antiquity.  For  as 
old  age  is  that  which  is  most  distant  from  in- 
fancy, it  must  be  manifest  to  all  that  old  age 
in  the  universal  man  should  not  be  sought 
in  the  times  near  his  birth  but  in  the  times 
most  distant  from  it.  Those  whom  we  call 
the  ancients  are  really  those  who  lived  in  the 
I  youth  of  the  world  and  the  true  infancy  of 
man ;  and  as  we  have  added  the  experiences 
of  the  ages  between  us  and  them  to  what  they 
knew,  it  is  only  in  ourselves  that  is  to  be  found 
that  antiquity  which  we  venerate  in  others." 

Such  has  been  the  theory  which  has 
underlain  the  study  of  history  since  the 
days  of  Schleiermacher.  Indeed,  it  may 
be  said  to  have  given  birth  to  the  modern 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.      45 

historical  method,  which  is  distinguished 
from  earlier  methods  by  its  attempt  to 
penetrate  into  the  inner  meaning  of  events 
or  doctrines,  with  the  sole  purpose  of 
reaching  the  truth  which  they  embodied, 
and  of  exhibiting  this  truth  in  its  organic 
relation  to  human  progress.  For  after  the 
crude  controversies  of  the  last  century, 
the  vision  began  to  dawn  upon  far-seeing 
minds  that  some  definite  purpose  ran 
through  human  affairs ;  that,  instead  of 
moving  blindly  to  and  fro,  humanity  was 
acting  as  if  under  the  guidance  of  an  in- 
telligent will  to  the  accomplishment  of 
some  vast  beneficent  end ;  that  enough 
was  discernible  to  indicate  such  an  in- 
creasing purpose,  though  the  goal  might 
be  still  remote  and  hidden  from  view. 
This  is  the  doctrine  of  development  which, 
on  its  religious  side,  assumes  with  Lessing 
that  God  is  educating  the  human  race  just 
as  children  are  trained  by  tutors  and  gov- 
ernors, or  by  the  experience  and  observa- 
tion of  life.  We  may  connect  this  doc- 


46  Religious  Progress. 

trine  with  the  words  of  Christ,  which  He 
spoke  of  the  Spirit,  —  He  shall  lead  you 
into  all  truth.  "If  that  Spirit,"  said 
Bishop  Thirlwall,  "by  which  every  man 
spoke  of  old  is  forever  a  living  and  present 
Spirit,  its  later  lessons  may  well  transcend 
its  earlier." 

It  is  well  to  remember  that  this  doc- 
trine of  development  had  been  announced 
and  had  become  the  working  principle  of 
historical  investigation  long  before  it  was 
applied  by  Darwin  to  the  physical  order. 
Perhaps,  also,  it  is  better  to  retain  the 
word  development  as  standing  for  the  law 
of  progress  in  humanity;  since  the  word 
evolution  may  carry  ideas  which  are  true 
of  the  order  of  outward  nature,  but  which 
do  not  apply  to  the  spiritual  world. 

It  would  seem  as  if  a  doctrine  of  prog- 
ress like  this,  at  once  so  rational,  so  ele- 
vating, so  practical,  would  find  universal 
acceptance,  becoming  a  law  to  the  indi- 
vidual for  self-cultivation,  as  well  as  to 
statesmen  or  reformers,  who  are  called  to 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.       47 

guide  the  destinies  of  a  people.  As  an 
historical  method,  it  has  redeemed  and 
justified  the  course  of  the  ages  behind  us ; 
it  has  not  only  enabled  the  past  to  live 
again  so  that  we  may  understand  and  ap- 
propriate its  truth,  but  it  has  pointed  out, 
also,  its  deficiencies,  and  shown  how  they 
may  be  supplemented  or  corrected.  The 
study  of  the  past  may  give  direction  for 
the  future,  affording  us  a  chart  by  which 
we  may  guide  our  movement  over  the 
otherwise  trackless  ocean  of  human  exis- 
tence. When  we  know  how  the  race  of 
man  has  traveled  before  us,  we  know 
something  of  the  route  to  be  followed  as 
well  as  of  that  to  be  avoided.  Instead 
of  breaking  with  the  past  by  revolution,  or 
by  violent  reactions,  we  have  the  order  of 
beautiful  and  symmetrical  growth.  Cul- 
ture and  the  slow  but  sure  process  of  edu- 
cation will  become  powerful  agencies  for 
promoting  true  reform.  In  the  light  of 
the  growing  truth,  whatever  is  irrational, 
or  superstitious,  or  false,  would  be  doomed 
to  fade  away  and  disappear. 


4$  Religious  Progress. 

At  this  point,  however,  we  confront  one 
of  the  most  perplexing  anomalies  in  hu- 
man experience.  While  it  may  be  that 
in  the  normal  moods  of  human  society 
a  gradual  progress  by  culture  and  educa- 
tion is  the  true  method  to  be  followed, 
so  that  the  old  shall  grow  into  the  new 
without  the  evils  which  wait  upon  revo- 
lution or  commotion,  yet  not  only  has 
this  method  not  prevailed  in  the  past,  but 
there  have  been  crises  in  history  when  its 
application  would  have  been  impossible. 
There  is  one  man  to  whom  we  invariably 
revert  when  we  think  of  a  great  oppor- 
tunity which  was  lost  for  gradual  reform. 
Erasmus,  who  stood  for  this  principle  in 
the  age  of  the  Reformation,  deprecated  a 
religious  revolution  as  an  incalculable  in- 
jury to  the  cause  of  human  progress,  and 
sought  to  avert  it  by  doing  all  in  his  power 
to  enlighten  the  world  of  his  time,  in  the 
hope  that  evils  and  abuses  would  quietly 
disappear,  while  the  general  order  of  the 
church  would  remain.  But  when  Luther 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.       49 

arose,  the  star  of  Erasmus  went  down. 
If  Erasmus  could  have  had  his  way,  there 
would  have  been  no  break  with  the  me- 
diaeval church,  and,  as  some  regard  it,  the 
sin  of  schism  would  have  been  prevented. 
There  are  many  scholars  who  take  this 
view ;  indeed,  it  has  almost  come  to  be 
known  as  the  scholarly  attitude  toward 
the  Reformation. 

In  the  words  of  Clough  in  his  "Amours 
de  Voyage"  :  — 

Luther,  they  say,  was  unwise :  like  a  half -taught  Ger- 
man, he  could  not 

See  that  the  old  follies  were  passing  most  tranquilly  out 
of  remembrance ;  — 

Leo  the  Tenth  was  employing  all  efforts  to  clear  out 
abuses  — 

Jupiter,  Juno,  and  Venus,  Fine  Arts  and  Fine  Letters, 
the  Poets, 

Scholars  and  Sculptors  and  Painters  were  quietly  clear- 
ing away  the 

Martyrs  and  Virgins  and  Saints,  or,  at  any  rate,  Thomas 
Aquinas ;  — 

He  must  forsooth  make  a  fuss  and  distend  his  huge 
Wittenberg  lungs,  and 

Bring  back  theology  once  yet  again  in  a  flood  upon  Eu- 
rope :  — 


50  Religious  Progress. 

Lo,  you,  for  forty  days  from  the  windows  of  heaven  it 

fell ;  — 
Waters  prevail  on  the  earth  yet  more  for  a  hundred  and 

fifty; 
Are  they  abating  at  last  ?     The  doves  that  are  sent  to 

explore  are 
Wearily  fain   to   return  at   the  best  with  a  leaflet  of 

promise,  — 
Fain  to  return  as  they  went  to  the  wandering  wave-tost 

vessel, 
Fain  to  reenter  the  roof  which  covers  the  clean  and  the 

unclean. 
Luther,  they  say,  was  unwise ;  he  did  n't  see  how  things 

were  going. 

This  opinion  of  scholars,  which  regards 
it  as  a  mistake  that  Luther,  and  not  Eras- 
mus, should  have  led  the  Reformation,  is 
rather  an  inference  from  a  certain  theory 
of  progress  than  a  conclusion  based  upon 
the  full  knowledge  of  things  as  they  are. 
I  am  inclined  to  hazard  the  statement  that 
no  one  familiar  with  all  that  preceded  or 
followed  the  protest  of  Luther,  no  one 
acquainted  with  the  history  of  the  age  of 
the  Renaissance  and  of  the  Catholic  or 
Counter-Reformation,  can  come  to  any 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.       57 

other  conclusion  than  that  Luther  was 
divinely  called  and  impelled  to  his  task. 
Even  had  there  been  no  Luther,  there  was 
Henry  VIII.  and  the  national  movement 
in  England,  which  alone  would  have  been 
sufficient  to  arouse  the  Inquisition  or  to 
generate  a  Loyola ;  in  a  word  to  give  Spain 
the  opportunity  which  she  coveted.  In 
this  view  your  own  distinguished  teacher 
of  church  history  concurs,  whose  book  on 
the  Reformation  entitles  him  to  speak  with 
authority.  We  may  and  we  must  hold  to 
the  doctrine  that  religious  reforms  are 
better  accomplished  by  the  gradual  process 
of  education  and  enlightenment ;  but  we 
must  admit  that  there  come  moments  in 
history  when  this  method  does  not  avail, 
—  the  birth-hour  of  great  institutions  which 
are  to  remould  the  fortunes  of  society. 
Fortunately,  these  crises  are  exceptional 
and  rare  ;  only  these  two,  clearly  demon- 
strated to  be  such,  —  the  age  of  the  Protes- 
tant Reformation,  and  the  age  of  the 
coming  of  Christ,  of  which  the  words  were 


52  Religious  Progress. 

spoken,  "  I  am  not  come  to  send  peace  on 
earth,  but  a  sword,"  and  "A  man's  foes 
shall  be  they  of  his  own  household." 

The  conception  of  progress,  as  an  even 
or  uniform  development  by  means  of  cul- 
ture or  enlightenment,  encounters  other 
obstacles  than  those  afforded  by  the  ano- 
malies of  history.  It  is  a  conception  pecu- 
liarly liable  to  be  misunderstood,  often, 
indeed,  so  greatly  perverted  as  to  become 
untrue. 

It  is  misinterpreted  when  it  is  so  con- 
strued as  to  teach  that  every  change  is  a 
direct  advance,  so  that  what  is  latest  in 
time  is  for  that  reason  superior  to  what 
has  gone  before.  Wordsworth's  illustra- 
tion needs  to  be  kept  in  view  that  the 
stream  often  turns  backward  in  its  course 
in  order  to  escape  some  obstacle  which 
hinders  its  direct  movement.  History  is 
full  of  instances  of  this  reversion  of  the 
current.  There  may  be  cases  where  it 
does  not  return  to  its  normal  path  until 
after  the  generations  have  passed  away. 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.       53 

A  recent  writer  in  a  valuable  book  on  the 
growth  of  the  spirit  of  Christianity  makes 
the  ancient  church  of  the  first  five  centu- 
ries correspond  to  the  period  of  the  child- 
hood of  the  faith,  the  Middle  Ages  to  its 
youth,  the  Reformation  to  its  mature  man- 
hood. But  in  reality  the  Middle  Ages  was 
in  most  important  aspects  so  far  inferior 
to  the  ancient  church,  in  what  concerns 
civilization  or  intellectual  culture  or  theo- 
logical insight,  that  it  sat  devoutly  at  the 
feet  of  the  earlier  age,  as  its  blind,  submis- 
sive pupil.  The  Protestant  Reformation 
did  not  at  once  issue  in  the  happy  results 
which  had  been  anticipated,  but  on  the 
contrary  so  great  were  the  evils  attending 
its  course  that  we  can  hardly  wonder  many 
should  have  reverted  fondly  to  the  age 
before  Luther  arose  as  a  more  favorable 
moment  to  the  higher  interests  of  life. 
Undoubtedly,  when  we  take  the  long  sur- 
vey of  the  centuries  the  advance  is  clear  ; 
but  to  demonstrate  it  at  every  stage  of  the 
movement  is  not  possible. 


54  Religious  Progress. 

And  again,  the  comparison  of  Pascal 
which  makes  the  life  of  humanity  as  a 
whole  follow  the  stages  of  growth  in  the 
individual  from  childhood  through  youth 
to  maturity,  valuable  as  are  the  elements 
of  truth  it  may  contain,  is  often  so  misin- 
terpreted as  to  neutralize  its  meaning. 
What  is  the  meaning  of  those  words  of  St. 
Paul,  "  When  I  became  a  man  I  put  away 
childish  things  "  ?  Surely  not  that  every 
belief  or  institution  which  had  its  rise  in 
the  early  stages  of  the  history  of  the  race 
is  for  that  reason  discredited,  and  its  rejec- 
tion demanded  by  the  later  age  which  has 
entered  upon  the  inheritance  of  manhood. 
It  is  a  popular  fallacy,  with  which  any  true 
doctrine  of  progress  must  contend,  that  if 
a  belief  or  practice  can  be  traced  to  a  re- 
mote origin,  or  the  stages  of  its  growth  be 
shown,  it  ought  no  longer  to  commend  it- 
self to  the  present  enlightened  age.  So  a 
recent  writer  has  remarked  that  "To  see 
the  process  of  the  formation  of  a  doctrine 
is  already  to  behold  its  dissolution."  An 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.      55 

eminent  preacher  not  long  ago  gave  as  his 
reason  for  ceasing  to  administer  the  Lord's 
Supper  that  it  went  back  for  its  rude  be- 
ginnings to  the  savage  custom  of  feeding 
on  the  flesh  or  drinking  the  blood  of  an 
enemy  slain  in  war. 

The  lamentable  result  of  these  misappli- 
cations of  a  great  principle  is  to  leave  the 
spirit  no  rest  or  sure  foundations.  For 
nothing  can  be  permanently  attained  so 
long  as  the  primary  obligation  is  to  be 
always  looking  out  for  something  new. 
Hardly  have  we  reached  a  position  in 
which  our  feet  may  securely  stand  when  we 
are  called  on  to  renounce  it,  if  we  would 
not  be  denounced  as  laggards,  traitors 
to  the  principle  of  progress.  No  validity 
must  be  recognized  in  what  has  been 
accomplished  lest  it  should  interfere  with 
the  new  light  which  may  break  in  on  us 
from  some  unexpected  quarter.  All  things 
must  remain  in  a  fluid  state,  the  chaos  of  a 
perpetual  becoming:  History  vanishes  in 
a  panorama  of  dissolving  views.  If  there 


56  Religious  Progress. 

is  to  be  a  creed  at  all,  it  must  be  revised 
each  day,  as  we  rise  in  the  morning,  in 
order  to  be  in  harmony  with  our  latest 
mood,  the  last  new  book,  the  most  recent 
scientific  discovery.  Hence  the  present  is 
no  more  our  own  than  the  past,  and  we 
sail  into  the  misty  future  without  chart  or 
compass. 

v. 

There  is  a  third  conception  of  the  nature 
of  true  progress  which  makes  it  consist  in 
a  constant  struggle  to  regain  or  adhere  to 
that  which  is  old,  which  assumes,  as  its 
ruling  idea,  that  the  new  is  false ;  only  that 
which  can  be  shown  to  be  old  is  true.  To 
seek  for  new  truth  is  to  endanger  the  basis 
of  the  religious  life  or  the  foundations  of 
religious  certitude. 

Such  an  attitude  often  deserves  to  be 
condemned  as  a  blind  conservatism,  op- 
posed to  real  progress,  the  refuge  only  of 
those  who  rest  on  custom  and  do  not  wish 
to  be  disturbed,  the  bulwark  of  religious 
indifference  on  the  one  hand  or  of  a  timid 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.      57 

and  skeptical  but  persecuting  ecclesiasti- 
cism  on  the  other.  "  Since  we  are  un- 
able," said  the  pagan  Cecilius,  in  the 
apology  of  Minucious  Felix,  "  to  know 
anything  of  that  world  which  is  above  the 
senses,  since  philosophy  has  still  to  search 
for  the  secret  of  things,  that  which  we 
had  better  do  is  to  hold  by  the  Gods  of 
the  fathers."  In  the  same  fashion,  accord- 
ing to  the  Koran,  the  advocates  of  the  old 
idolatries  of  Arabia  answered  the  new 
prophet :  "  We  have  found  our  fathers 
practicing  this  worship  and  we  are  guided » 
by  their  steps."  To  Mohammed  in  his 
disappointment  Allah  gave  reassurance,  — 
it  had  always  been  so  ;  no  prophet  had 
ever  been  sent  who  had  not  met  the  same 
reply.  Nor  had  the  reply  come  from  the 
poor  and  ignorant  but  from  the  wealthier 
classes  ;  —  "  We  have  sent  no  warner  unto 
any  city  but  the  inhabitants  thereof  who 
lived  in  affluence  said,  *  Verily  we  believe 
not  that  with  which  ye  are  sent.' ' 

It  is  also  characteristic  of  this  attitude 


5#  Religious  Progress. 

that  while  it  rejects  every  change  as  an  in- 
novation, and  regards  every  innovation  as 
evil,  because  endangering  the  truth  which 
should  be  unchangeable,  yet  it  is  not  inca- 
pable of  receiving  new  truth  ;  only,  when 
it  does  so  it  immediately  proceeds  to  call  it 
old,  to  assert  that  it  has  always  been  an 
integral  part  of  the  immutable  heritage. 
It  has  devious  ways  of  incorporating  the 
new  with  the  old  leaven,  while  also  it  may 
turn  and  rend  those  who  are  so  unfortunate 
as  to  be  its  heralds. 

The  principle  which  lies  beneath  this 
attitude  toward  progress  is  that  divine 
revelation  has  once  for  all  imparted  the 
full  truth  by  which  men  may  live ;  that, 
therefore,  the  highest  duty,  the  most  sol- 
emn obligation,  is  to  hand  it  on  un- 
changed, unimpaired,  from  generation  to 
generation.  It  is  also  assumed  that  there 
is  an  evil  and  downward  tendency  in  hu- 
man nature,  whose  effect  is  to  pervert  the 
truth  by  overlaying  it  with  additions,  cor- 
rupting it  by  complications,  till  at  last  it 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.       59 

becomes  so  obscured  as  to  need  a  repro- 
clamation  in  its  original  simplicity.  The 
philosophy  of  history,  to  minds  in  this 
condition,  is  summed  up  in  the  necessity 
for  a  series  of  prophets,  who  appear  at 
intervals  as  they  are  needed,  whose  func- 
tion is  always  to  announce  the  old  truth 
which  was  from  the  beginning.  Such  was 
the  rude  philosophy  of  Mohammedanism. 
The  prophet  of  Islam  had  not  been  sent 
to  announce  new  truth,  but  to  clear  away 
the  obstructions,  the  many  dogmas  of  the 
Christian  Church,  which  prevented  the  old 
truth  from  being  clearly  discerned.  He 
freely  admitted  the  credentials  of  the  He- 
brew prophets  who  had  preceded  him ;  he 
had  no  fault  to  find  with  the  teaching  of 
Christ,  —  that  in  itself  was  true,  but  it 
had  been  overlaid,  complicated  by  the  false 
teaching  of  apostles,  or  the  definitions  of 
councils,  till  it  was  no  longer  capable  of 
being  understood  or  obeyed,  and  must 
therefore  be  reasserted  in  its  first  purity 
and  with  a  deeper  emphasis.  All  the 


60  Religious  Progress. 

prophets,  according  to  Mohammed,  when 
rightly  interpreted,  had  proclaimed  the 
same  immutable  truth,  by  the  recognition, 
indeed,  of  which,  they  were  known  to  have 
a  prophetic  calling. 

How  often  have  we  heard  this  view  pre- 
sented in  Christian  circles,  as  if  the  only 
explanation  needed  for  the  complex  phe- 
nomena of  religious  history,  that  each 
successive  dispensation  or  epoch  ends  in 
failure  because  of  the  fatal  activity  of  hu- 
man error.  God  makes  his  covenant  with 
Adam  only  to  be  defeated  by  human  wick- 
edness. He  renews  his  covenant  with 
Noah,  with  Abraham,  with  Moses,  but 
each  successive  mission  of  the  divine  love 
is  defeated  by  the  growing  evil,  until  at 
last  He  comes  to  the  rescue,  when  things 
are  at  their  worst,  in  the  mission  of  his 
Son.  There  are  those  to-day  who  seem 
to  make  it  an  act  of  obligation  to  believe 
that  the  Christian  dispensation  is  already 
doomed  to  failure,  the  faith  is  to  grow 
cold  and  almost  disappear  from  the  earth 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.       61 

in  order  to  the  preparation  for  the  second 
coming  of  the  Son  of  Man. 

Principles  may  be  true,  though  we  may 
greatly  differ  as  to  their  application.  We 
shall  readily  admit,  I  think,  this  tendency 
to  deterioration  which  waits  upon  all  re- 
ligious institutions.  In  their  first  procla- 
mation religious  motives  are  spontaneous 
and  free,  more  pure,  more  rational,  than  in 
their  later  history,  when  they  are  apt  to 
degenerate  into  a  hard  literalism,  sup- 
ported by  tradition  rather  than  by  reason, 
corrupted  by  cant,  bolstered  up  by  verbal 
commentators ;  so  that  they  who  would 
escape  their  dark  shadow  must  needs  go 
back  in  the  interest  of  truth  and  freedom 
to  their  first  proclamation. 

There  is  a  deep  root  of  truth,  also,  in 
the  demand  for  the  unchangeable,  the  im- 
mutable, as  the  final  word  in  religion.  We 
cry  out  for  the  eternal  which  changes  not, 
as  the  last  resort  of  our  being,  as  when  we 
are  wearied  with  speculation  which  calls 
all  things  in  question ;  when  we  are  tired 


62  Religious  Progress. 

of  incessant  change,  which  masquerades 
under  the  name  of  progress ;  when  we 
become  hopeless  after  long  gazing  into  a 
blank  and  empty  future.  In  the  crises 
of  our  being  we  fall  back  upon  those 
undefined,  mysterious  instincts,  postulates 
of  our  nature  which  are  most  simple, 
most  universal,  whose  traces  go  back  to 
the  remotest  ages.  Even  in  the  social 
order  this  motive  may  act  most  power- 
fully, as  in  the  utterances  of  Burke  in  his 
"Vindication  of  Natural  Society"  against 
the  leaders  of  the  French  Revolution : 
"  It  is  the  lapse  of  time  which  consti- 
tutes the  most  solid  of  all  claims,  not  only 
to  property,  but  to  that  which  secures 
property —  the  State  ;  the  world  would  go 
to  pieces  if  the  practice  of  all  moral  duties 
and  the  foundations  of  society  rested  upon 
having  their  claims  made  clear  and  demon- 
strated to  every  individual."  So,  also,  in 
the  ecclesiastical  order,  St.  Augustine,  in 
his  great  work  on  the  "  City  of  God,"  char- 
acterizes the  earthly  city  as  affected  by 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.       63 

change,  mutation,  and    decay ;  while   the 
city  of  God  is  the  one  and  the  same  un- 
changeable  purpose  which  runs    through  ' 
human  history  from  its  first  beginning. 

It  was  under  the  influence  of  this  mood 
that  Bossuet  wrote  his  "Variations  of  Pro- 
testantism," assuming  as  axiom  that  truth 
has  but  a  single  aspect,  that  simplicity 
and  unchangeableness  are  the  marks  by 
which  it  is  known.  But  the  Latin  Church, 
which  has  accepted  his  method  as  conclu- 
sive, has  no  monopoly  of  this  conviction. 
The  same  feeling  led  Richard  Baxter,  the 
most  sturdy  of  Protestants,  towards  the 
close  of  a  life  passed  in  agitation  and  con- 
troversy, to  put  his  faith  in  those  simple, 
unchanging  truths  regarding  which  men  are 
more  generally  agreed,  and  to  deem  those 
principles  as  more  uncertain  about  which 
there  was  greater  difference  of  opinion. 

We  get  an  illustration  of  the  same  mood 
in  the  burial  service  of  the  English  Church, 
which  long  since  ceased  to  express  the 
passing  changes  of  religious  experience  or 


64  Religious  Progress. 

aspiration,  which  offers  comfort  by  remind- 
ing us  of  the  common  lot,  repeating  the 
sad  wail  of  humanity  over  the  common  fate. 
England's  great  poet,  when  he  took  his 
leave  of  a  sorrowing  people,  turned  to 
Shakespeare  for  comfort,  as  if  he  found 
support  in  the  veriest  commonplaces,  the 
reflections  which  come  without  effort  to 
all  alike,  the  oldest,  simplest  utterances  of 
natural  religion  :  — 

"  Fear  no  more  the  heat  of  the  Sun, 

Nor  the  furious  winter's  rages, 
Thou  thine  earthly  task  hast  done, 
Home  art  gone  and  ta'en  thy  wages." 

Mr.  Matthew  Arnold,  the  prophet  of 
change  and  reform,  sought  the  final  con- 
solation in  the  permanence  of  nature  :  — 

"  But  let  me  be, 

While  all  around  in  silence  lies, 
Moved  to  the  window  near,  and  see 
Once  more  before  my  dying  eyes, 

"  Bathed  in  the  sacred  dews  of  morn, 
The  wide  aerial  landscape  spread, 
The  world  which  was  ere  I  was  born, 
The  world  which  lasts  when  I  am  dead." 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.       65 

The  words  of  Scripture  occur  to  us  in 
this  connection,  of  which  a  beautiful  in- 
stance is  the  QOth  Psalm,  —  the  prayer  of 
Moses,  the  man  of  God,  where  the  trust  in 
God's  immutability  is  the  deepest  current 
of  the  soul :  — 

"  Before  the  hills  in  order  stood, 
Or  earth  received  her  frame, 
From  everlasting  thou  art  God, 
To  endless  years  the  same." 

From  the  influence  of  this  deep  instinct 
in  our  nature,  which  in  the  midst  of  change 
calls  for  that  which  is  permanent,  few  can 
claim  to  be  exempt.  The  reactionary 
ecclesiastic,  declaring  that  variation  is  the 
badge  of  error,  while  sameness  is  the  mark 
of  the  truth,  is  not  so  far  away,  as  to  the 
principle  at  issue,  from  a  religious  agitator 
like  Theodore  Parker,  who  began  his  ca- 
reer as  a  reformer  with  his  sermon  on  the 
"Transient  and  the  Permanent  in  Reli- 
gion." That  which  is  old,  that  which 
powerfully  affected  our  early  years,  may  at 
any  moment  reassert  its  control,  until 


66  Religious  Progress. 

under  its  dissolving  charm  the  accretions 
of  our  middle  age,  the  nice  distinctions  of 
controversy,  the  differences  which  were 
magnified  till  they  assumed  a  vital  impor- 
tance, —  these  all  fade  away  into  insignifi- 
cance or  nothingness.  The  late  French 
historian,  M.  Renan,  who  renounced  Chris- 
tianity for  the  scientific  interpretation  of 
life,  seems  to  have  had  this  distrust  of 
himself.  When  he  reached  the  age  of  sixty 
he  proposed  to  stereotype  his  thought,  put- 
\  ting  on  record  those  opinions  formed  and 
held  in  his  best  moments,  before  disease 
or  age  had  weakened  his  powers. 

According  to  the  theory  of  progress  to 
which  I  first  alluded,  it  is  the  differences, 
the  distinctions  which  are  important,  and 
to  these  even  what  claims  to  be  permanent 
must,  if  necessary,  be  sacrificed.  But  here 
the  differences  and  distinctions  are  of  no 
avail ;  it  is  the  old,  the  common,  the 
unchangeable,  which  is  to  be  desired, 
wherein  lies  also  the  basis  of  certitude. 
In  opposition  to  those  who  assert  the  value 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.       67 

of  theological  distinctions,  or  who  would 
justify  religious  differences,  finding  in 
these  very  differences  some  essential  ut- 
terance of  the  divine  revelation,  the  posi- 
tion is  assumed  that  all  religious  systems 
are  true  where  they  agree,  all  alike  untrue 
or  doubtful  where  they  differ.  "  Somehow 
it  has  come  to  be  taken  for  granted,"  said 
the  late  Mr.  Maurice,  "  among  scholars  as 
well  as  in  the  popular  literature  of  the  day, 
that  the  various  theological  characteristics 
of  the  religions  of  the  world  must  yield  and 
disappear ;  that  when  they  are  gone  there 
will  survive  something  of  a  very  general 
character,  some  great  ideas  of  what  is  good 
and  beautiful,  some  excellent  maxims  of  I 
life,  which  may  very  well  assimilate,  if  they 
be  not  actually  the  same,  with  the  essential 
principles  contained  in  all  other  religions, 
and  which  will  also,  it  is  hoped,  abide  for- 


68  Religious  Progress. 

VI. 

It  has  been  my  endeavor  to  present 
these  divergent  and  contradictory  theories 
of  religious  progress  in  an  impartial  man- 
ner, and  as  fairly  as  if  I  were  an  advocate 
of  each  ;  while,  at  the  same  time,  I  have 
stated  the  objections  to  each  one  of  them, 
the  perversion  into  which  each  may  de- 
generate, as  any  sincere  opponent  might 
do.  But  I  have  not  found  it  possible  to 
make  myself  an  advocate  of  any  one  of 
them  to  the  exclusion  or  condemnation  of 
the  others.  To  my  mind  they  appear  as 
alike  legitimate,  as  having  been  justified 
by  the  experience  of  history,  while,  also, 
they  have  ministered  to  evil  results  when 
pushed  too  far,  or  when  any  one  of  them 
has  been  enforced  to  the  rejection  of  the 
others.  If  the  effect  of  my  statement  is 
to  produce  a  hopeless  sense  of  complexity 
and  confusion,  so  that  life  or  progress 
seems  like  a  process  in  which  no  law  of 
unity  could  prevail,  does  not  real  life  or 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.      69 

progress,  as  we  actually  know  it  in  the 
world  around  us,  produce  the  same  im- 
pression ?  Not  only  do  we  everywhere 
perceive  these  varying  motives  in  opera- 
tion, but  they  have  subtle  ways  of  com- 
bining, of  modifying  each  other,  of  shading 
off  into  each  other,  till  it  is  hard  to  dis- 
tinguish them,  and  men  may  even  pass 
from  the  influence  of  one  motive  to  that 
of  its  opposite,  as  from  reaction  to  con- 
servatism, without  being  aware  of  any  vio- 
lent wrench  in  their  experience.  Indeed, 
when  we  come  to  analyze  our  own  con- 
sciousness, or  to  define  the  methods  by 
which  our  own  development  has  been  at- 
tained, are  we  not  baffled  by  the  lack  of 
consistency  which  is  revealed,  the  contra- 
dictions which  we  are  unable  to  harmonize  ? 
It  is  because  these  conflicting  motives 
may  all  unite  in  the  experience  of  one 
individual  that  we  know  they  stand  some- 
how related  to  unity,  as  if  necessary  ele- 
ments in  one  organic  process.  We  grow 
by  means  of  these  antagonisms  within  us, 


70  Religious  Progress. 

so  that  a  life  in  subordination  to  one  of 
these  motives  alone  becomes  shallow,  or 
one-sided  and  incomplete.  A  man  who 
has  not  detected  within  himself  the  pre- 
sence of  these  contradictory  forces  has 
missed  the  larger  interpretation  of  life, 
and  can  neither  understand  himself  nor 
the  world  around  him.  While  we  are 
aiming  at  consistency,  as  if  it  were  an 
intellectual  or  moral  ideal,  we  may  only 
be  reducing  our  personality  to  a  smaller 
stature.  On  the  one  hand,  a  man  may 
feel  that  he  must  always  abide  by  the 
violent  reactions  of  his  youth  against  the 
teaching  of  his  fathers  ;  and  if  he  succeeds 
in  maintaining  this  attitude,  we  speak  of 
him  as  a  man  who  has  not  grown,  though 
others  may  admire  him  for  his  consistency. 
And  on  the  other  hand,  one  may  react 
against  the  teaching  of  his  childhood ;  but 
when  years  have  passed  away  be  able  to 
recognize  in  it  a  new  meaning  and  a  deeper 
value,  reconciling  without  difficulty  the 
new  truth  which  he  has  reached  with  the 


The  Experience  of  the  Individual.       71 

old  truth  which  he  once  thought  he  had 
abandoned  forever.  Thenceforth,  he  may 
have  learned  that  there  is  a  higher  mode 
of  human  development,  and  strive  always 
to  hold  the  old  and  the  new  in  vital  or- 
ganic relationship. 

In  this  first  lecture  I  have  been  dealing 
with  my  subject  mainly  from  the  point  of 
view  of  the  individual  man.  The  motives 
which  I  have  traced  first  began  to  operate 
powerfully  in  the  age  of  the  Reformation, 
when  what  we  call  individualism  first  ap- 
peared as  one  of  the  forces  of  history.  The 
period  of  the  Middle  Ages  knew  little  or 
nothing  of  the  inward  personal  conflict 
which  marks  the  modern  world,  nor  did  it 
have  that  exuberant  variety  of  religious 
faiths  which  has  since  grown  up.  Author- 
ity, or  the  sense  of  solidarity,  kept  the  indi- 
vidual in  subjection,  making  impossible 
the  full  expression  of  the  content  of  the 
human  soul.  It  is  a  common  complaint 
to-day,  that  individualism  has  gone  too  far, 
to  the  neglect  of  the  opposite  factor,  the 


72  Religious  Progress. 

truth  which  is  held  by  th^  whole  family  of 
humanity,  in  solidarity.  In  my  second 
lecture  I  propose  to  treat  of  religious  prog- 
ress as  manifested  in  the  larger  organic 
body  which  we  call  the  Church,  whose  life 
may  be  more  unconscious,  not  subject  to 
the  possibility  of  self-direction  as  is  the 
individual,  —  a  life  which  goes  deeper  than 
theories  and  has  the  power  of  reconciling 
the  conflicts  of  the  schools. 


II. 

Religious  Progress  in  the  Organic  Life  of  the 
Church. 

ENTLEMEN  :  In  my  first  lecture, 
I  dwelt  upon  three  forces  or  ten- 
dencies which  are  closely  related 
to  religious  progress.  We  may  discern 
their  agency  in  those  periods  of  the 
Church's  history  when  great  adjustments 
are  in  process  whose  end  is  the  enlarge- 
ment of  the  life  of  humanity.  We  see 
them  clearly  in  the  ancient  Church,  when 
Christianity  was  adjusting  itself  to  Jewish 
religion  on  the  one  hand,  or  to  the  civiliza- 
tion of  the  Graeco-Roman  world  on  the 
other.  Again  in  the  Protestant  Reforma- 
tion some  of  the  Reformers  were  bent  on 
discarding  every  trace  or  relic  of  the  age 
that  was  going  out,  rebuilding  the  ecclesi- 
astical fabric  from  the  foundation  with  new 
material ;  others  would  have  compromised 


74  Religious  Progress. 

between  the  old  and  the  new,  retaining  as 
much  as  possible  of  the  old  form,  but  ani- 
mating it  with  a  new  spirit  ;  but  the  Church 
of  Rome  could  find  no  other  principle  of 
guidance  than  to  reject  everything  which 
the  Reformers  demanded  simply  because 
they  wanted  it,  surrounding  the  tenets  of 
the  Middle  Ages  with  a  brazen  wall,  so 
that  henceforth  it  would  be  impossible  to 
touch  the  doctrines  of  the  Church  with 
the  destructive  hand  of  change.  And 
once  more,  these  same  motives  have  ap- 
peared as  vital  forces  in  our  own  age, 
which  is  one  of  restless  movement  caused 
by  many  and  diverse  influences,  the  final 
outcome  of  which  we  are  as  yet  unable  to 
determine. 

Let  me  recapitulate  these  various  ten- 
dencies once  more.  There  are  those  who 
maintain  that  a  retrograde  evil  tendency 
inheres  in  all  human  effort,  in  human 
thought  and  speculation,  which  obscures 
or  makes  void  the  truth  ;  that  in  order  to 
hold  firmly  to  the  divine  revelation  we  are 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church.        75 

continually  called  to  remove  these  accre- 
tions and  complications  of  human  perver- 
sity. Truth  is  simple  and  error  is  com- 
plex ;  truth  is  always  and  everywhere  the 
same,  while  error  stands  condemned  by  its 
variations  ;  truth  must  always  be  sought 
in  the  past  rather  than  the  present  age, 
and  that  which  is  new  cannot  be  true.  On 
the  other  hand  stands  the  reformer  with 
his  new  truth,  which,  as  he  claims,  is  in 
antagonism  to  the  old  belief,  and  necessa- 
rily involves  the  destruction  of  the  old  in- 
stitution ;  the  aim  of  progress  is  to  get 
rid  of  the  old  as  the  obstacle  which  pre- 
vents the  regeneration  of  the  world,  as  if 
in  order  to  the  reception  of  Him  who  de- 
clares, "Behold,  I  make  all  things  new." 
And  then  there  are  those  who  would  medi- 
ate between  these  contradictions,  who  feel 
competent  to  throw  light  on  the  situation 
or  give  direction  for  the  course  to  be  fol- 
lowed. The  past  is  not  wholly  wrong,  nor 
is  the  new  complete  in  itself.  There  is  a 
gradual  advance  from  the  old  to  the  new. 


7<5  Religious  Progress. 

Let  revolution  at  all  hazards  be  avoided  as 
destructive  of  true  progress.  Culture  will 
bring  about  the  desired  end  ;  the  process 
of  education  is  slow  but  sure,  and  will  re- 
move the  evil.  The  law  of  progress  is 
here  conceived  as  a  regular  and  even  ad- 
vance, a  movement  forward,  —  always  for- 
ward and  upward, — just  as  the  law  of 
growth  in  the  sphere  of  organic  life  in  the 
external  world.  If  it  is  not  so,  or  has  not 
been  so  in  the  world  of  human  affairs,  it 
ought  to  be  so  ;  the  business  of  the  thinker, 
or  of  him  who  would  be  the  leader,  is  to 
make  human  progress  conform  to  its  di- 
vine law. 

But  now  we  all  feel,  I  think,  that  no  one 
of  these  attitudes,  nor  all  of  them  taken 
together,  quite  describe  the  actual  situa- 
tion as  we  know  it.  In  the  light  of  his- 
tory, or  of  our  own  experience,  there  is 
something  wanting  to  them,  there  are  po- 
tencies at  work  of  which  these  theories 
contain  no  hint.  In  the  processes  of  ac- 
tual life,  there  is  some  larger  utterance  of 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Cburch.        77 

the  voice  of  the  Spirit  in  man  which  does 
not  greatly  care  for  speculation,  but  asks 
chiefly  for  the  super-essential  bread  upon 
which  the  soul  may  feed  ;  there  is  a  rec- 
onciling power  in  life  which  builds  the 
institution  under  which  we  live,  without 
regard  to  intellectual  consistency,  and  to 
this  end  makes  compromises  or  bridges 
the  abysses  and  contradictions  of  human 
philosophies.  In  the  light  of  this  great 
reality  of  human  life  as  it  is  in  this  world, 
the  theories  which  I  have  described,  when 
rigidly  held,  assume  a  doctrinaire  aspect, 
as  if  properties  of  the  schools,  but  not 
the  supreme  motive  of  an  organic  spir- 
itual order.  They  enter,  indeed,  into  the 
process  of  life,  but  not  as  theories  to  be 
consistently  maintained,  rather  as  if  al- 
lowed to  contribute  their  quota,  as  they 
are  able,  to  the  great  result. 


j8  Religious  Progress. 

i. 

Let  me  ask  you  to  go  back  for  a  mo- 
ment to  the  ancient  Catholic  Church  for 
an  illustration  of  what  I  may  call  the 
larger  way  of  the  spirit  of  life  as  con- 
trasted with  individual  motives  of  self- 
development,  or  theories  about  what  the 
need  of  the  world  requires.  There  is  a  dis- 
tinct advantage  in  reverting  to  this  distant 
time,  for  there  the  picture  is  complete, 
and  we  can  also  view  it  dispassionately, 
unmoved  by  the  sympathies  or  the  preju- 
dices of  the  present  hour.  By  the  Catholic 
Church,  I  mean  the  Church  of  the  early 
centuries  which  called  itself  catholic,  as 
in  the  creeds.  It  was  not  the  same  as 
the  Apostolic  Church,  or  that  of  the  gen- 
erations which  immediately  followed,  but 
it  succeeded  that  Church,  and,  as  it  were, 
-i;splaced  it.  It  is  not  the  same  as  the 
Roman  Church,  for  that  did  not  appear 
equipped  for  its  peculiar  work  until  much 
later,  until  the  Catholic  Church  had  ful- 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church.        79 

filled  its  task  and  passed  over  into  other 
forms.  Nor  do  I  appeal  to  the  Catholic 
Church,  as  an  ideal  for  our  own  age.  It 
long  ago  disappeared,  superseded  by  other 
phases  of  Christianity.  But  in  its  own 
day  it  accomplished  a  great  mission,  and  ^ 
many  of  its  solutions  of  religious  problems 
we  still  retain  as  a  valuable  part  of  our 
spiritual  heritage. 

In  this  ancient  Church  was  solved  the 
conflict  between  Peter  and  Paul,  between 
the  apostle  to  the  Jews  and  the  apostle  to 
the  Gentiles.  No  doubt  the  contradiction 
or  antagonism  between  them  has  been 
greatly  exaggerated,  as  by  the  Tubingen 
school ;  but  all  will  admit  that  the  antago- 
nism did  exist  to  a  certain  extent,  that  the 
original  twelve  apostles  showed  no  incli- 
nation to  break  with  Judaism,  but  rather 
regarded  Christianity  as  if  its  continuation 
or  completion.  They  still  continued  to 
worship  in  the  temple,  maintaining  ami- 
cable relations  with  the  Jewish  Church  in 
Jerusalem.  St.  Paul,  on  the  other  hand, 


8o  Religious  Progress. 

in  his  earlier  years,  at  least,  broke  vio- 
lently and  completely  with  Judaism,  affirm- 
ing that  it  had  been  superseded  by  the 
faith  in  Christ,  teaching  as  in  the  Epistle 
to  the  Galatians,  that  any  one  who  would 
possess  the  spirit  of  Christ  must  be  eman- 
cipated from  obedience  to  the  ceremonial 
law,  the  beggarly  elements,  as  he  called 
them,  of  bondage  to  Jewish  formalism. 

The  issue  raised  by  St.  Paul  was  taken 
up  by  the  schools  of  the  second  century, 
in  the  great  speculative  inquiry,  how  Ju- 
daism was  related  to  the  Christian  Church. 
Three  different  answers  were  given  to  the 
question.  In  the  first  place,  it  was  main- 
tained by  Marcion,  one  of  the  most  in- 
fluential men  of  his  time,  that  Christianity 
and  Judaism  had  nothing  whatever  in  com- 
mon. Christianity  was  something  new,  un- 
known before,  with  no  preparation  for  its 
advent,  an  abrupt  revelation,  as  it  were, 
from  the  heavens.  So  vast  was  the  differ- 
ence between  the  two  religions,  so  vital 
the  distinction  between  Gospel  and  Law, 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church.        81 

between  mercy  and  justice,  that  they  could 
not  have  had  a  common  author.  If  the 
one  came  from  a  good  deity,  the  other 
must  have  come  from  an  imperfect,  if  not 
an  evil  deity.  So  far  did  Marcion  carry 
his  repugnance  to  Judaism,  that  he  re- 
jected the  Old  Testament,  and  in  form- 
ing a  Canon  of  the  New  Testament,  he 
retained  only  the  Epistles  of  St.  Paul, 
together  with  the  Gospel  according  to  St. 
Luke,  as  written  by  one  of  Paul's  disciples. 
Nor  was  Marcion  alone  in  this  estimate 
of  Jewish  scriptures  and  ceremonial.  The 
unknown  author  of  the  important  Epistle 
to  Diognetus  held  a  similar  view,  as  also 
the  author  of  the  Epistle  of  Barnabas, 
both  of  which  treatises  were  highly  es- 
teemed and  are  included  among  the  writ- 
ings known  as  the  "  Apostolic  Fathers." 
If  this  judgment  about  Judaism  had  pre- 
vailed, the  two  religions  would  have  been 
severed  and  the  Old  Testament  have  been 
lost  to  the  Christian  Church. 

On  the  other  hand  were  the  represen- 


82  Religious  Progress. 

tatives  of  what  is  known  as  the  Pseudo- 
Clementine  school,  in  whose  writings 
Peter  rather  than  Paul  is  regarded  as  the 
apostle  of  genuine  Christianity,  and  ac- 
cording to  which  there  is  not  only  no  op- 
position between  Christianity  and  Judaism 
but  there  is  no  difference  between  them, 
—  the  two  religions  are  identical.  In  the 
attitude  of  this  school  we  have  an  illustra- 
tion of  the  conviction  that  the  substance 
of  religious  truth  does  not  vary  with  time, 
that  religion  is  founded  in  the  immuta- 
bility of  the  divine  will.  If  what  the  de- 
cree of  Jehovah  had  once  ordained  were 
to  be  rejected,  the  basis  of  all  religious 
faith  would  be  removed.  The  ingenuity 
of  these  writings  known  as  the  Clemen- 
tines is  displayed  in  a  fantastic  way  in 
working  over  the  contents  of  the  two  re- 
ligions, eliminating  from  them  that  which 
is  distinctive  of  each,  until  the  desired 
identity  can  be  established  in  the  common 
residuum  which  is  left,  —  the  one  true  re- 
ligion which  was  from  the  beginning.  Be- 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church.        83 

tween  this  school  and  that  of  Marcion 
there  was  bitter  antagonism,  which  it  did 
not  seem  possible  to  overcome. 

There  was  a  third  attitude  for  whose 
representative  we  may  take  Basil  eides,  one 
of  the  Gnostic  philosophers,  who  aimed  to 
look  deeply  into  the  religious  wants  of  his 
age.  In  his  spirit  he  was  almost  a  modern, 
for  he  had  caught  the  idea  of  uniform  law 
pervading  all  ranks  and  stages  of  the  crea- 
tion. All  things,  according  to  his  philoso- 
phy, were  developing  from  beneath  up- 
ward, in  one  vast  ascending  movement. 
Christianity,  as  he  believed,  was  the  abso- 
lute or  perfect  religion,  but  the  religions 
which  had  preceded  it  were  not  in  oppo- 
sition to  it  as  the  false  to  the  true,  but 
rather  imperfect  revelations,  serving  the 
purpose  of  an  earlier  stage  of  development 
and  preparing  the  way  for  the  highest 
truth.  His  idea  was  a  true  one,  but  his 
application  of  it  was  unfortunate,  —  a  sort 
of  speculative  exposition  of  religious  his- 
tory to  meet  the  exigencies  of  his  theory. 


84  Religious  Progress. 

According  to  his  system,  a  deity  who  was 
ignorant  and  of  low  degree  had  reigned 
over  the  world  from  the  time  of  Adam 
until  Moses ;  then  had  appeared  a  higher 
deity  who  proclaimed  the  Mosaic  Law  ;  and 
at  last  the  highest  God  had  spoken  in  the 
revelation  brought  by  Christ. 

Each  of  these  three  attitudes  contained 
a  truth  ;  but  each  was  inadequate,  and  all 
alike  were  rejected  by  the  Catholic  Church, 
which  was  also  exercised  by  the  same  prob- 
lem, and  determined  it  by  the  power  of  a 
living  faith.  Peter  and  Paul  were  there  rec- 
ognized as  having  a  common  authority  and 
as  joint  founders  of  the  Church.  In  this 
reconciliation,  or  compromise  as  it  is  called, 
no  effort  was  made  to  harmonize  Law  and 
Gospel,  but  both  were  sanctioned  as  mak- 
ing up  the  new  faith,  and  the  recognition 
of  a  difference  between  them  gradually 
faded  away.  What  the  true  relation  was 
between  Judaism  and  Christianity,  or  the 
relative  authority  of  Jewish  and  Christian 
scriptures,  the  Church  did  not  determine 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church.        85 

then,  nor  has  it  been  determined  to  this 
day.  But  in  the  retention  of  the  Old  Tes- 
tament by  the  Catholic  Church  we  may  see 
the  working  of  the  principle  that  Christi- 
anity is  old,  going  back,  as  the  Pseudo- 
Clementines  held,  to  the  Patriarchs,  even 
to  Adam  ;  there  is  the  recognition  of  the 
permanent,  unchanging  truth  which  was 
from  the  beginning. 

If,  however,  the  Church,  by  accepting 
the  Old  Testament  as  having  the  authority 
of  Scripture,  seemed  to  commit  itself  to 
the  position  that  the  divine  will  is  unalter- 
able, that  what  God  has  once  decreed  for- 
ever remains  binding  on  the  conscience,  yet 
also  it  did  justice  to  the  principle  for  which 
Marcion  contended,  --  that  Christianity 
brought  to  the  world  a  change,  something 
that  was  new.  It  regarded  the  Jewish 
scriptures,  indeed,  as  containing  a  divine 
revelation ;  but,  then,  what  innovations  it 
approved,  what  contradiction  of  the  teach- 
ing of  those  scriptures,  till  their  authority 
might  almost  seem  to  be  set  at  naught! 


86  Religious  Progress. 

One  of  the  mightiest  innovations  which 
was  sanctioned  —  a  revolution  it  might  be 
called  —  was  in  changing  the  name  of 
Deity,  by  which  also  was  expressed,  better 
than  Marcion  had  done,  the  wide  difference 
between  the  old  religion  and  the  new.  In 
the  Old  Testament  Jehovah  had  been  the 
name  by  which  God  had  declared  his  will 
to  be  known  ;  in  the  new  dispensation  the 
name  of  God  is  the  Father,  the  Son,  and 
the  Holy  Ghost.  And  another  change 
wrought  by  the  Catholic  Church  under  the 
consciousness  of  a  divine  warrant,  as  if  God 
were  again  speaking  from  the  heavens, 
was  the  abolition  of  the  Jewish  Sabbath 
and  the  substitution  for  it  of  the  Christian 
Sunday.  Whatever  appropriations  from 
Jewish  ceremonial  the  Church  may  have 
afterwards  adopted,  as  in  her  sacerdotal 
institutions,  there  was  henceforth  no  dan- 
ger that  the  Church  would  revert  to  Juda- 
ism, or  that  the  gulf  which  separated  the 
religions  would  be  overcome. 

But  in  the  vast  sweep  of  the  living  forces 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church.      87 

of  the  time,  we  can  also  discern  another 
motive,  —  the  Church  acted  upon  the  prin- 
ciple that  the  old  prepares  the  way  for  the 
new.  Tertullian  almost  anticipated  that 
theory  of  progress  by  which  the  lower  gives 
birth  to  the  higher  in  accordance  with  some 
uniform  order  or  law.  The  age  of  the 
Father  prepares  the  way  for  the  dispensa- 
tion of  the  Son,  and  this  in  turn  yields  to 
the  age  of  the  Holy  Spirit,  —  childhood, 
youth,  and  manhood,  that,  said  Tertullian, 
is  the  philosophy  of  the  world's  spiritual 
history.  Hence,  in  accordance  with  this 
principle,  he  and  others  of  his  time  be- 
gan to  search  in  the  Old  Testament  for 
traces  of  the  preparation  for  the  advent  of 
Christ.  There  is  nothing  more  impressive 
and  beautiful  in  the  history  of  religious 
thought  than  the  way  in  which  the  early 
Catholic  Church  proceeded  to  make  the 
conquest  of  another  religion,  appropriat- 
ing its  sacred  books  and  yet  maintaining 
itself  in  its  distinction  and  superiority  as  [ 
the  conqueror  over  the  conquered.  It  fairly 


88  Religious  Progress. 

honeycombed  the  Jewish  scriptures  with 
the  Christian  interpretation.  The  Jehovah 
of  the  Old  Testament  was  resolved  into 
the  Christ  of  the  new  age,  so  that  Christ 
appeared  as  speaking  there  on  every  page, 
in  every  chapter,  and  every  leading  event ; 
every  prominent  personage,  every  devout 
experience  or  aspiration,  as  in  the  Psalter, 
or  every  utterance  of  hope,  as  in  the  pro- 
phets, became  a  type,  a  forerunner,  a  pro- 
phecy of  Christ. 

We  may  be  sometimes  tempted,  in  the 
light  of  modern  Biblical  criticism,  to  smile 
contemptuously  at  the  headings  of  the 
chapters,  as  in  the  old  English  Bibles, 
which  see  Christ  in  the  Canticles,  where  it 
was  never  meant  that  He  should  be,  or  in 
so  many  other  places  where  the  allegorical 
interpretation  misses  the  historic  fact. 
The  "  higher  criticism  "  is  right  in  main- 
taining how  indispensable  it  is  that  we 
should  trace  clearly  the  human  element, 
the  actual  historical  circumstance,  and  not 
lose  it  by  merging  it  in  some  unreal  or 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church.      89 

fanciful  recognition  of  the  divine.  But 
the  higher  criticism  can  never  destroy  that 
power  of  faith,  which  sees  life  as  an  or- 
ganic whole,  where  that  which  has  been 
and  that  which  is  point  away  from  them- 
selves to  some  mystic  meaning  in  events, 
which  we  cannot  understand  or  measure 
at  the  moment,  —  suggestions  that  we  are 
always  moving  about  in  worlds  not  real- 
ized. 

ii. 

The  method  by  which  the  Catholic 
Church  of  the  early  centuries  dealt  with 
the  antagonisms  in  its  bosom,  while  it  may 
not  furnish  a  law  of  religious  progress, 
does  yet  point  to  a  principle  always  to  be 
discerned  in  operation,  wherever  we  may 
turn  in  the  religious  world.  That  princi- 
ple is  the  acceptance  of  contradictions 
whether  they  can  be  intellectually  recon- 
ciled or  not ;  the  tacit  approval  of  both 
sides  in  a  controversy,  rather  than  the 
enforcement  of  some  via  media  between 
them  ;  as  though  truth  did  not  lie,  as  has 


90  Religious  Progress. 

been  fondly  supposed,  midway  between 
two  extremes,  but  was  rather  constituted 
by  the  union  of  opposite  propositions  as 
together  combining  in  a  living  whole.  The 
doctrine  of  the  via  media  has  never  been 
a  working  principle  in  theology.  Just  as 
any  one  may  recall  in  his  own  experience 
what  it  is  to  have  a  leading  or  primary 
sympathy  with  one  side  of  a  controversy, 
and  at  the  same  time  a  certain  subordinate 
sympathy  with  the  other,  so  in  the  larger 
collective  life  of  the  Church,  the  final  re- 
sult of  a  long  controversy  has  been  the 
sanction  practically  extended  to  both  par- 
ties, neither  of  which,  compete  afterwards 
as  they  may,  can  ever  attain  exclusive 
supremacy.  As  regards  the  doctrine  of 
the  Person  of  Christ,  so  long  and  angrily 
discussed  in  the  ancient  Church,  the  final 
verdict  of  the  Christian  consciousness 
maintains  the  apparently  contradictory 
conclusion  that  He  is  one  and  the  same 
with  the  Father,  while  yet  distinct  from 
and  different  from  the  Father ;  or  in  regard 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church.       91 

to  the  operation  of  divine  grace  in  human 
salvation,  debated  so  bitterly  between 
Augustine  and  Pelagius,  the  Church  has 
practically  settled  down  in  the  conviction, 
that  the  work  is  of  God  and  also  of  man. 
No  via  media,  however  subtly  constructed 
or  nicely  balanced,  possesses  such  living 
power  of  reconciliation  and  harmony  as 
this  union  of  conflicting  and  opposite 
truths. 

It  is  a  lesson  which  we  are  slow  to  learn, 
that  opposites  are  closely,  even  vitally 
related ;  that  hostile  attitudes  which  seem 
irreconcilable  may  both  be  true.  Our  own 
experience  or  the  experience  of  history 
may  reveal  to  us  the  ease,  the  naturalness 
of  the  transition  from  one  extreme  to 
another.  It  would  almost  seem  as  if,  in 
the  sphere  of  religion,  each  attitude  was 
seeking  its  opposite  in  order  to  supplement 
its  own  deficiency.  The  Roman  Catholic 
Church,  which  dreads  secularism  as  its 
greatest  foe,  is  nearer  to  it  in  its  own 
essential  principle  than  it  imagines,  as  if 


p2  Religious  Progress. 

one  of  its  functions  was  to  prepare  its 
members  for  graduation  into  the  larger 
world.  The  late  Blanco  White  is  an  illus- 
tration of  the  process  by  which  a  gifted 
spirit,  having  exhausted  all  that  Rome  can 
give,  seeks  to  complete  its  life  by  traveling 
till  it  can  go  no  further  in  the  opposite 
direction.  He  experimented  at  first  with 
Newman's  via  media  of  Anglicanism,  then 
he  tasted  the  cool  rationalism  of  Whately, 
then  moved  on  to  Unitarianism,  which  he 
finally  left  for  what  seemed  like  a  barren 
and  dreary  waste,  —  the  open  world  in  its 
separation  from  the  Church,  where  a  man 
must  make  a  religion,  if  he  is  to  have  one 
at  all,  out  of  devotion  to  purely  secular 
interests.  On  the  other  hand,  the  late 
Dr.  Brownson  traveled  in  the  opposite 
direction  from  a  world  disorganized  as  it 
seemed  to  him,  from  the  transcendentalism 
which  divinizes  an  imperfect  humanity, 
till  he  finally  reached  an  ultramontanism 
so  extreme  and  destructive  as  to  go  beyond 
the  Vatican  or  the  leaders  of  the  Society 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church.       93 

of  Jesus.  It  is  a  striking  circumstance 
which  has  often  been  noted,  that  while 
John  Henry  Newman  went  to  Rome,  his 
brother  Francis,  whose  mind  was  of  a  simi- 
lar type,  passed  over  to  what  is  called  infi- 
delity, to  what,  however,  was  as  sacred  to 
him  as  ecclesiasticism  was  to  his  brother. 
The  saintly  George  Herbert  of  Bemerton, 
who  idealized  every  accident,  as  it  were, 
in  the  faith  and  worship  of  the  Church  of 
England,  had  his  counterpart  in  his  brother 
Lord  Herbert  of  Cherbury,  who  became  a 
pioneer  of  natural  religion  or  the  deism  of 
the  eighteenth  century.  The  connection 
is  so  close  between  these  apparently  hos- 
tile attitudes  that  it  is  sometimes  hard  to 
detect  the  difference  in  principle  which 
separates  them.  To  secularize  the  divine 
is  the  policy  of  Rome  ;  to  divinize  the  secu-  j 
lar  is  the  motive  of  its  most  extreme  antag- 
onist. But  if  one  is  true,  so  also  is  the 
other.  The  reconciliation  lies  in  adopting 
both  ;  then  they  modify  each  other,  with 
the  result  of  a  larger,  completer  truth. 


94  Religious  Progress. 

Among  the  Protestant  churches  the 
same  tendency  is  apparent.  There  is  con- 
stant moving  to  and  fro,  and  in  search  of 
some  attitude  which  is  in  flat  contradiction 
to  the  principle  of  the  denomination  which 
is  abandoned.  Mr.  Gladstone  has  lately 
made  an  effort  to  show  that  most  of  those 
who  deserted  the  Church  of  England  for 
the  Roman  communion,  at  the  time  of 
the  Tractarian  controversy,  such  as  New- 
man and  Manning,  Wilberforce  and  Faber, 
came  originally  of  Low  Church  or  evan- 
gelical antecedents,  exchanging  the  famil- 
iar formula  of  "  no  priest,  no  sacrifice,  no 
altar,"  for  the  blindest  devotion  to  priest- 
hood and  hierarchy.  Congregationalists 
\  or  Presbyterians  when  they  enter  the  Epis- 
copal Church  are  apt  to  become  the  most 
'  uncompromising  High  Churchmen.  The 
•  descendant  of  the  Quaker  makes  the  most 
|  devoted  of  Ritualists.  The  Methodist  who 
abandons  his  fold,  who  previously  had  found 
his  chief  social  excitement  or  happiness  in 
the  Church,  looks  with  a  more  kindly  eye 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church.        95 

on  the  amusements  of  society  which  he  had 
been  taught  to  denounce  as  evil.  The  dif- 
ference is  not  so  great  between  the  Univer- 
salist  who  denies  the  existence  of  a  place 
of  endless  punishment  and  his  opponent 
who  affirms  such  a  belief  as  if  almost  es- 
sential to  salvation.  For  so  easy  is  it  to 
change  one's  belief  on  this  subject,  that 
the  affirmation  or  the  denial  may  stand  for 
methods  of  religious  training,  so  that  if  a 
man  cannot  serve  God  and  obey  his  law 
under  the  incentive  of  love,  he  turns  back 
to  the  incentive  of  fear.  No  one  who  has 
experienced  the  process  of  conversion,  by 
which  a  revolution  is  wrought  in  the  soul 
from  sin  to  holiness,  from  the  love  of  self 
to  the  love  of  God,  can  ever  fail  to  be  pro- 
foundly grateful  ;  and  yet  happy  also  is  he 
who  has  never  known  the  necessity  of  con- 
version, but .  has  grown  under  Christian 
nurture  into  the  divine  love,  and  who  can- 
not point  to  the  time  when  he  did  not  feel 
as  if  he  were  the  child  of  God. 

In  some  of  the  controversies  which  have 


9$  Religious  Progress. 

convulsed  and  divided  the  religious  world 
time  may  be  needed,  and  the  long  lapses  of 
time,  before  the  issue  is  clear.  Then  it 
may  be  revealed  that  there  was  an  element 
of  truth  in  the  cause  which  was  defeated, 
which  for  ages  had  lain  under  the  ban  of 
condemnation.  The  heretic  Nestorius 
was  deposed  and  excommunicated  because 
he  denounced  the  favorite  designation  of 
Mary  as  the  "  Mother  of  God  "  (0eoTo/cos). 
When  a  thousand  years  had  passed  away 
and  the  theologians  of  the  Reformation 
came  to  their  task,  they  unanimously  re- 
jected the  word  from  their  confessions  of 
faith  ;  the  Church  of  England,  also,  omitted 
the  word  in  her  Articles  of  Religion,  and 
it  was  dropped  silently  and  without  a  pro- 
test from  her  liturgy  and  other  ritual 
offices,  where  formerly  it  had  been  of  fre- 
quent occurrence.  What  is  known  as 
Nestorianism  separated  the  human  from 
the  divine,  in  order  to  the  preservation 
of  the  human,  lest  it  should  be  absorbed 
and  lost  in  the  divine  ;  overlooking  the 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church.        97  - 

truth  in  the  attitude  of  Cyril,  who  saw 
the  divine  and  the  human  in  such  close 
conjunction  that  they  seemed  to  him  to 
be  but  one.  If  we  lose  the  human  by 
merging  it  in  the  divine,  as  is  the  ten- 
dency of  ecclesiasticism,  we  are  forced  to 
seek  it  again  by  separating  and  distinguish- 
ing between  them.  Such  may  be  called 
the  purpose  of  the  higher  criticism  in 
our  own  day,  which  vindicates  the  place 
and  importance  of  the  human  element  in 
Scripture ;  the  same  essential  issue  about  < 
which  Cyril  and  Nestorius  were  contend- 
ing in  the  fifth  century.  This  is  the  con-  ( 
troversy  of  the  Christian  ages  from  which 
it  seems  as  if  we  never  should  escape.  In 
the  early  Church  it  turned  upon  the  person 
of  Christ,  in  the  Middle  Ages  upon  the 
Eucharist,  in  the  Protestant  world  upon  *- 
the  Bible.  If  we  cannot  escape  the  contro- 
versy, at  least  we  can  escape  the  shameful 
method  by  which  it  was  pursued  in  ancient 
times,  by  recognizing,  with  the  fathers  of 
the  great  council  of  Chalcedon,  that  the 


9$  Religious  Progress. 

attitudes  which  the  controversy  generates 
are  vitally  related  to  each  other;  that  it 
only  needs  to  bring  them  together,  contra- 
dictory as  they  may  seem,  in  order  to  the 
completed  truth,  —  Christ  is  both  human 
and  divine ;  the  Eucharist  remains  com- 
posed of  bread  and  wine,  and  is  yet  ver- 
itably the  body  and  the  blood  of  Christ ; 
the  Bible  is  literature  like  any  other  book, 
and  yet  it  is  also  the  word  of  God.  These 
things  are  not  to  be  confused  or  mixed  or 
confounded,  but  also  are  not  to  be  sepa- 
rated or  divided. 

Every  religious  movement  has  its  nega- 
tive side,  consisting  in  opposition  to  ten- 
ets which  seem  to  contradict  its  own,  and 
by  resistance  to  which  it  gains  impetus 
and  momentum  for  its  career.  But  when 
the  new  movement  has  run  its  race,  only 
the  positive  truth  which  it  has  advocated 
remains,  and  this  in  some  mysterious  way 
coalesces  with  its  contradiction. 

Most  of  the  mischief  of  religious  con- 
troversy springs  from  the  desire  and  de- 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church.        99 

termination  to  impute  to  one's  opponent 
positions  which  he  does  not  hold,  or  to 
draw  inferences  from  his  principles,  insist- 
ing that  he  shall  be  held  responsible  for 
them,  even  though  he  declares  that  he 
does  not  teach  them.  We  say  that  he 
ought  to  accept  them ;  that  he  is  bound 
logically  to  do  so  ;  that  they  are  necessary 
deductions  from  his  system  ;  that  the  ten- 
dency of  his  teaching  is  in  these  directions  ; 
and  then  we  denounce  and  condemn  him 
for  that  which  he  disowns.  It  was  in  this 
way  that  Augustine  rilled  out  for  Pelagius 
the  gaps  in  his  scheme  which  he  thought 
necessary  to  do,  in  order  to  make  Pelagius's 
teaching  consistent  and  complete ;  and 
Pelagius,  in  his  turn,  drew  inferences  from 
the  Augustinian  theology  about  which  Au- 
gustine would  have  preferred  to  maintain 
a  discreet  silence.  Neither  Augustine  nor 
Calvin  was  anxious  to  make  prominent 
the  doctrine  of  the  reprobation  of  wicked 
to  damnation,  but  preferred  to  dwell  on 
the  more  attractive,  more  rational  tenet  of 


UNIVERSITY  OF  REDIANDS  UBRARi 

100  Religious  Progress. 

the  elect  to  salvation,  as  subjects  of  the 
divine  choice  and  approbation  ;  substituting 
for  the  obnoxious  word  reprobation,  the 
milder,  euphemistic  term  preterition.  It 
was  their  opponents  who  were  bent  on 
forcing  them  out  of  their  reserve,  push- 
ing them  into  what  seemed  the  consistent 
sequence  of  their  attitude,  and  then  hold- 
ing it  up  before  the  world  for  execration. 
And  the  same  remark  would  apply  to  al- 
most every  theological  contention  which 
has  embittered  the  Church's  experience. 

It  seemed  strange  and  inexplicable  to 
Macaulay  that  a  man  of  such  rare  intelli- 
gence as  Sir  Thomas  More  should  have 
gone  back  to  the  doctrine  of  transubstan- 
tiation,  which  the  wisdom  of  his  age  was 
almost  unanimous  in  rejecting.  But  it 
must  also  be  remembered  that  Sir  Thomas 
More  had  gone  further  than  his  contempo- 
raries, in  presenting,  in  his  "  Utopia,"  the 
baldest  deism  as  the  ideal  religion  in  a 
perfectly  organized  community,  according 
to  which  men  worshiped  as  they  pleased, 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church.      101 

or  did  not  worship ;  where  a  complicated 
religious  system  was  unknown ;  where  no 
external  authority  interfered  with  indi- 
vidual freedom.  But  he  became  alarmed 
when  he  witnessed  the  excesses  of  the 
Reformation,  whose  destructive  tendency 
seemed  to  threaten  the  safeguards  of  re- 
ligion and  morality.  He  reacted  as  we 
say ;  he  went  back  and  took  up  again  the 
old  authority  which  he  had  been  on  the 
point  of  discarding,  accepting  all  which 
it  enjoined  ;  whether  any  particular  tenet 
agreed  with  his  reason  was  a  matter  of 
no  importance. 

We  reach  here  a  point  of  view  from 
which  Macaulay's  stricture,  to  which  I 
alluded  in  my  first  lecture,  loses  its  force. 
There  is  nothing  incompatible  in  such  a 
circumstance  with  a  true  conception  of 
religious  progress.  Macaulay  thought  of 
progress  as  following  the  same  law  in  the 
spiritual  world  as  in  the  natural  world,  an 
even  and  regular  advance,  knowing  no  re- 
actions, discarding  the  old  with  every  for- 


702  Religious  Progress. 

ward  step.  He  did  not  recognize  that 
contradictions  might  be  related  to  prog- 
ress ;  that  opposite  attitudes  might  each 
hold  something  of  essential  truth  which 
the  other  lacked.  But  his  inference  is  a 
plausible  one,  and  its  wide  prevalence 
as  a  popular  judgment  may  teach  us  that 
there  is  yet  something  to  be  done  in 
the  argument  with  Rome  before  we  can 
come  to  a  common  understanding.  The 
late  Frederick  Robertson,  the  inimitable 
preacher,  but  also  a  profound  thinker, 
was  convinced  that  the  true  method  in 
religious  controversy,  and  especially  with 
Rome,  was  to  seek  for  reconciliation,  not 
in  via  media,  as  Newman  fondly  thought, 
but  in  the  exploiting  of  contradictions,  in 
order  to  the  truth  contained  in  them, 
rather  than  the  error.  He  illustrated  his 
method  in  a  remarkable  sermon  on  the 
Glory  of  the  Virgin  Mother.  In  a  sug- 
gestive paragraph  he  also  pointed  out 
other  instances,  among  them,  the  famous 
doctrine  of  transubstantiation,  where  the 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church.      103 

application  of  the  same  mode  of  treatment 
might  show  that  this  tenacious  dogma  of 
the  Middle  Ages,  which  no  negative  argu- 
ment has  been  able  to  overthrow,  was  not 
incompatible  with  the  theory  of  Zwingle, 
which  makes  the  Sacrament  a  memorial 
of  the  body  and  the  blood  of  Christ.  The 
error  in  this  ancient  doctrine  is  not  that 
a  miracle  has  been  wrought  to  the  eye  of 
faith,  by  which  the  common  sustenance  of 
physical  life  has  been  transmuted  into  the 
bread  of  immortality,  but  that  the  priest 
has  the  power  of  working  the  miracle  by 
an  incantation.  Rather  was  the  transmu- 
tation accomplished  once  for  all  by  the  life 
of  the  incarnate  Word,  —  a  great  act  which 
sufficed  so  that  it  need  not  as  well  as  can- 
not be  repeated;  an  act  which  the  faith 
of  the  worshiper  discerns  anew  in  every 
sacrament,  while  the  office  of  the  ritual  is 
to  call  attention,  as  by  a  memorial,  to  the 
original  Word  by  whom  the  transformation 
was  once  wrought  and  forever. 

It  is  because  men  hold  some  inadequate 


Religious  Progress. 

theory  of  progress,  or  do  not  discern  the 
various  and  conflicting  elements,  which 
are  the  conditions  of  true  progress,  that 
we  so  often  hear  the  charge  of  dishonesty 
alleged  against  those  who  combine  the 
new  truth  with  the  old  faith.  For  they 
combine  them  as  though  it  were  a  simple 
duty ;  the  most  natural,  the  most  admirable 
thing  to  do.  They  are  amazed  when  some 
radical  reformer,  of  the  type  of  Marcion 
in  the  ancient  Church,  or  some  ecclesias- 
tical reactionary  confronts  them  with  the 
contradiction  of  which  they  are  guilty,  or 
insinuates  their  intellectual  insincerity, 
calling  upon  them  in  the  name  of  com- 
mon honesty,  either  to  renounce  the  old 
creed,  or  else  abandon  the  new  truth.1 
There  are  many  to  whom  such  advice  is 
congenial  as  the  only  method  by  which 

1  "  If  we  wish,"  says  Rothe,  "  to  pray  in  unison  with 
our  Christian  forefathers,  we  must  use  the  same  words 
that  they  did ;  for  they  cannot  understand  our  peculiar 
mode  of  speech,  while  we  are  very  well  able  to  under- 
stand theirs."  The  remark  might  be  easily  extended  in 
its  application  to  cover  the  use  of  the  ancient  creeds. 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church.      105 

they  can  grasp  or  retain  the  new  discovery. 
But  such  has  not  been  the  method  of  the 
Church  at  large  in  the  long  range  of  its 
history ;  it  has  not  been  the  process  of 
actual  life,  dealing  with  realities  at  the 
heart  of  things  and  setting  lightly  by  theo- 
ries which  control  the  schools. 

I  do  not  know  of  any  better  illustration 
than  the  case  of  St.  Augustine,  whose 
teaching  was  certainly  new,  a  daring  inno- 
vation, but  which  the  Church  in  the  West 
pronounced  to  be  old,  as  if  held  from  the 
beginning.  You  remember  that  Vincen- 
tius  of  Lerins  sought  to  rid  the  Church  of 
Augustine's  obnoxious  teaching  regarding 
original  sin  and  predestination  by  coining 
that  wonderful  motto,  which  attracts  us 
while  it  also  repels,  —  the  test,  as  he  called 
it,  of  catholic  truth,  —  "  that  which  has 
always  and  everywhere  and  by  all  been  1 
received ; "  or  in  the  familiar  Latin,  Quod 
semper,  ubique  et  ab  omnibus,  creditum  sit. 
In  the  second  part  of  his  treatise  he 
showed  that,  judged  by  this  test,  Augus- 


106  Religious  Progress. 

tine's  teaching  lacked  the  seal  of  truth. 
The  Church  accepted  the  test  which  Vin- 
centius  laid  down,  —  it  was  so  exquisitely 
put  that  she  could  not  forget  it,  —  but  she 
approved  of  Augustine  also,  and  gave  to 
him  an  equal  place  with  his  elders.  All 
this  was  done,  to  be  sure,  in  a  most  uncrit- 
ical age;  but  in  such  moments  instincts 
may  have  sway  whose  expression  is  in  har- 
mony with  the  deepest  endowment  of  our 
humanity. 

Judged  by  the  criticism  of  the  under- 
standing, the  motto  of  Vincentius  is  only 
an  instance  of  vicious  reasoning  in  a  circle, 
as  Sir  George  Cornwall  Lewis  has  shown 
in  his  work  on  "  Authority  in  Matters  of 
Opinion."  The  motto  asserts,  as  he  re- 
marks, "that  a  certain  doctrine  is  true 
because  it  was  held  at  all  times  and  in  all 
places  and  by  all.  But  when  it  is  found 
that  it  was  not  held  by  a  certain  sect  at  a 
certain  time  and  place,  it  is  answered  that 
they  are  not  to  be  considered  because  they 
are  not  a  part  of  the  Catholic  Church  ; 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church.     707 

but  when  it  is  inquired  why  they  are  not 
a  part  of  the  true  Church,  the  answer  is 
because  they  do  not  hold  the  doctrine  in 
question."  The  criticism  is  certainly  a 
just  one,  to  be  commended  to  partisans 
of  the  authority  of  the  past  who  think  to 
stay  the  wheels  of  progress  by  throwing 
this  canon  which  consecrates  immobility 
athwart  its  path.  But  when  the  Quod 
semper  may  be  so  interpreted  as  to  admit 
of  change  and  innovation,  we  have  an  in- 
stance of  the  power  of  life  to  reconcile 
the  insuperable  antagonism. 

Herein  lay  the  power  of  the  Roman 
Church  in  the  age  of  its  ascendency.  No 
contradictions,  however  radical,  were  then 
too  great  for  her  to  solve.  She  accepted 
the  monastery,  with  its  innate  opposition 
to  the  historic  episcopate ;  the  conflicting 
ideals  of  administration  and  prophecy,  of 
solidarity  and  individualism,  marriage  and 
celibacy,  poverty  and  wealth,  the  world 
and  the  rejection  of  the  world.  But  at 
last  there  was  bred  a  contradiction  to 


io8  Religious  Progress. 

which  she  was  not  equal,  — justification  by 
faith  in  conflict  with  hierarchical  institu- 
tionalism,  and  then  her  power  collapsed, 
her  dominion  was  gone.  Macaulay  was 
wrong  again,  misled  by  the  hallucination 
of  a  name,  when  he  thought  that  the  great 
Church,  whose  long  and  proud  career  in- 
voked his  admiration,  was  still  in  exist- 
ence. The  papacy  had  fallen  when  Luther 
refused  to  recant  at  the  Diet  of  Worms,  or 
when  Henry  VIII.  set  free  the  suppressed 
force  of  nationality,  and  England  became 
a  nation.  The  papacy  fell,  only  the  Bishop 
of  Rome  remained  ;  nor  will  the  day  come 
for  which  he  waits  and  sighs,  until  he  can 
accept  the  contradiction  between  authority 
and  freedom. 

If  I  may  be  allowed  a  reference  to  the 
Episcopal  Church,  with  whose  inner  work- 
ing I  am  more  familiar,  there  is  a  con- 
tradiction embedded  in  her  formularies, 
where,  in  the  Ordinal  for  the  Priesthood, 
the  presbyter  takes  the  vow  to  preach 
nothing  which  he  is  not  convinced,  or 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church.      109 

inwardly  persuaded,  is  true ;  and,  on  the 
other  hand,  to  set  forth  the  doctrine  as  * 
this  church  hath  received  the  same.  Pri- 
vate judgment  and  church  authority  here 
confront  each  other  with  an  equal  sanc- 
tion. Their  reconciliation  is  found  in  ways 
which  criticism  might  distrust.  There  are 
those  who  can  understand  and  follow 
church  authority  ;  there  are  those  who  can 
appreciate  the  value  of  private  judgment; 
they  often  fail  to  appreciate  each  other  ; 
but  in  the  mysterious  alembic  of  life  the 
contradiction  tends  to  disappear  ;  private 
judgment  makes  church  authority,  —  the 
doctrine  as  this  church  hath  received  the  j 
same,  rational  and  intelligible,  while  church  . 
authority  deepens  and  enlarges  the  range 
of  private  judgment. 

Churches  are  strong  and  best  fulfill  their 
mission,  not  in  proportion  as  they  maintain 
a  narrow  consistency,  but  rather  in  so  far 
as  they  are  capable  of  embracing  opposite  ( 
attitudes  and  contrasted  views  of  truth. 
Controversy  may  be  bad,  but  stagnation  is 


no  Religions  Progress. 

worse.  The  Church  which  we  look  for  in 
the  coming  age  of  Christian  unity  must 
I  embrace  greater  contradictions  than  any 
church  that  now  exists  is  willing  to  re- 
ceive. Let  me  enumerate  some  of  them 
as  I  close  this  part  of  my  discussion  :  — 
the  sovereignty  of  God  and  the  freedom  of 
the  will ;  total  depravity  and  the  divinity 
of  human  nature ;  the  unity  of  God  and  the 
triune  distinctions  in  the  Godhead  ;  gnosti- 
cism and  agnosticism ;  the  humanity  of 
Christ  and  his  incarnate  deity  ;  the  freedom 
of  the  Christian  man  and  the  authority  of 
the  Church  ;  individualism  and  solidarity  ; 
reason  and  faith  ;  science  and  theology  ;  the 
miracle  and  the  uniformity  of  law  ;  culture 
and  piety  ;  the  authority  of  the  Bible  as  the 
Word  of  God,  with  absolute  freedom  of  Bib- 
lical criticism  ;  the  gift  of  administration 
as  in  the  historic  episcopate,  but  the  gift 
of  prophecy  as  the  highest  sanction  of  the 
ministerial  commission ;  the  apostolic  suc- 
cession, but  also  the  direct  and  immediate 
call  which  knows  only  the  succession  of 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church,      in 

the  Holy  Spirit, — these,  and  others  which 
it  would  be  tiresome  to  mention,  are  antag- 
onisms whose  blending  in  organic  relation- 
ship by  the  mysterious  power  of  life  or 
progress  will  lead  us  into  the  fuller  truth 
for  which  we  wait. 

If  it  seems  to  any 'that  in  all  this  there 
is  no  practical  rule  of  guidance  for  the 
individual  in  the  formation  of  religious 
opinions,  or  that  the  result  would  be  disas- 
trous to  any  religious  sect  which  sought  to 
maintain  so  large  and  open-minded  hospi- 
tality to  conflicting  aspects  of  the  truth,  — 
to  these  objections,  which  are  not  without 
their  force,  it  may  still  be  replied  that 
there  are  organic  influences  in  the  religious 
sphere  which  tell  upon  us  all  alike,  upon 
individuals  and  upon  sects ;  which  may  act 
without  our  knowledge  or  even  against  our 
will ;  which  no  self -direction,  however  deter- 
mined or  clear  its  aim,  or  ecclesiastical 
policy,  however  exclusive,  can  ever  entirely 
evade.  To  harmonize  the  working  of  such 
a  law  with  theories  of  self-culture  or  the 


112  Religious  Progress. 

varying  ecclesiastical  policies  may  be  diffi- 
cult, if  not  impossible.  But,  at  least,  the 
lessons  of  history,  the  experience  of  the 
Church,  our  own  individual  experience  as 
well,  may  teach  us,  and  comfort  us  by 
teaching,  that  opposing  aspects  of  truth  do 
not  neutralize  or  destroy  each  other.  The 
reformers  who  speak  so  confidently  about 
this  or  that  phase  of  ecclesiastical  thought 
or  practice  as  destined  soon  to  disappear, 
may  be,  and  probably  in  most  cases  are, 
too  sanguine.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  no 
attitude  of  religious  belief  can  abide  wholly 
unchanged  after  the  serious  challenge  of 
controversy  which  asserts  its  opposite. 
Its  modification,  but  also  its  fulfillment  in 
some  larger  scheme  of  things,  is  sure. 

in. 

The  remaining  point  to  which  I  wish  to 
ask  your  attention  is  this  :  that  all  move- 
ments in  the  Christian  Church  or  in  Chris- 
tian history,  which  we  call  progressive, 
have  had  a  backward  look,  as  if  the  new 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church.      113 

truth  for  which  we  hunger  came  to  us  by 
the  revelation  of  the  past,  so  that  progress 
might  be  almost  identified  with  an  ever 
deeper  penetration  into  the  old  truth  and 
its  richer  appropriation. 

If  I  illustrate  this  proposition  by  the 
teaching  of  St.  Paul,  it  is  not  that  I  am 
seeking  to  commit  the  sacred  authority  of 
Scripture  to  some  theorizing  of  my  own  ; 
but,  because,  if  ever  a  writer  had  a  distinctly 
conceived  philosophy  of  history,  it  was  the 
great  apostle  to  the  Gentiles.  When  he 
was  controverting  the  Jews,  as  in  his  Epis- 
tle to  the  Galatians,  his  mind  traveled 
backward  to  a  greater  man,  and  a  greater 
age,  than  Moses  or  the  giving  of  the  Law, 
—  to  Abraham,  who  was  the  Father  of  the 
Faithful,  because  he  lived  by  faith ;  to 
whom  the  promise  was  given  before  he 
was  circumcised,  and  to  whom,  and  not  to 
Moses,  was  the  further  promise  that  in 
him,  not  one  people  only  but  all  the  na- 
tions of  the  earth  should  be  blessed.  The 
universality  of  the  earlier  age  is  here  con- 


ii4  Religious  Progress. 

trasted  with  the  particularism,  the  narrow 
exclusivism  of  the  later  age.  That  type  of 
religion  known  as  Judaism,  which  claimed 
Moses  as  its  authority  and  had  culminated 
in  ceremonialism,  appeared  to  St.  Paul, 
even  at  its  best,  as  a  passing  episode  in 
the  religious  training  of  man.  It  seemed 
so  irrational  in  the  light  of  faith  in  Christ, 
that  he  almost  wonders  how  God  should 
have  tolerated  it.  The  larger  universal 
attitude  which  Abraham  represented  must 
have  been  superseded  by  the  unspiritual 
and  legal  Judaism,  in  consequence  of  the 
hardness  of  men's  hearts.  If  even  so,  it 
had  served  a  purpose  in  the  divine  economy 
as  a  schoolmaster  to  bring  men  to  Christ  ; 
yet  now  that  its  task  was  done,  there  must 
be  a  return  to  the  larger  faith  of  Abra- 
ham, which  was  at  the  same  time  an  ad- 
vance into  the  liberty,  wherewith  Christ 
had  made  men  free.  So  also,  the  writer 
of  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews,  following 
the  method  of  St.  Paul,  rejects  the  priest- 
hood of  Aaron,  and  goes  back  to  a  still 


The  Organic  Life  of  tloe  Church.      7/5 

more  distant  age  for  the  type  of  a  higher, 
more  universal  priesthood  ;  Christ  had 
been  made  a  priest  forever  after  the  order 
of  Melchizedek,  that  mysterious  priest- 
king  of  a  remote  past,  whose  glory  it  was, 
that,  unlike  the  Aaronic  priesthood,  he 
was  without  father  or  mother,  his  gene- 
alogy or  his  succession  unknown,  who  had 
neither  beginning  nor  end  of  days,  but,  like 
the  Son  of  God,  a  priest  continually. 

In  the  history  of  the  Church,  the  desig- 
nation of  the  Middle  Ages  implies  a  period 
intervening  between  a  greater  past  and  a 
greater  future  ;  a  waiting  period  until  the 
past  should  be  restored,  and  its  ruling 
ideas  which  had  been  sacrificed  for  some 
immediate  purpose  should  be  regained. 
When  we  reach  the  Renaissance,  in  the 
fourteenth  and  fifteenth  centuries,  what 
we  know  as  progress,  what  is  generally 
admitted  to  be  progress,  began  to  work 
so  powerfully  as  to  change  the  face  and 
modify  the  character  of  civilization.  But 
the  Renaissance,  as  the  name  suggests, 


/  /  6  Religious  Progress . 

was  at  almost  every  point  a  return  to  an 
earlier  age,  before  the  Middle  Ages  began. 
The  leaders  of  the  movement  had  their 
faces  set  toward  the  past,  until  they 
brought  back  a  higher  world,  which  was 
also  a  lost  and  buried  world  until  resur- 
rected from  antiquity.  Kings  and  princes 
made  their  appeal  to  the  older  Roman  law, 
before  the  Canon  law  had  been  framed, 
in  order  that  by  the  restoration  of  its  au- 
thority they  might  be  freed  from  papal 
interference,  or  from  the  tyranny  of  the 
Holy  Roman  Empire.  Scholars  also  went 
back,  the  Humanists,  as  we  call  them, 
to  the  classical  writers  of  ancient  Greece 
and  Rome,  in  order  to  regain  the  old 
outlook  upon  life,  of  whom  Petrarch  is 
the  type  ;  they  studied  Cicero  and  Vergil 
and  Homer,  as  if  divine  guides  who  spoke 
by  revelation.  To  restore  the  ancient  lit- 
erature became  the  supreme  motive  of 
the  Renaissance,  in  which  princes  and 
ecclesiastics  combined  with  scholars,  cre- 
ating an  enthusiasm  for  a  by-gone  age  by 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church.      7/7 

which  their  own  age  threatened  to  be 
submerged.  If  Aristotle  had  been  the 
teacher  of  the  Middle  Ages,  Plato  now 
furnished  the  inspiration  toward  move- 
ment in  another  direction,  till  almost 
every  change,  every  revolution  in  thought 
or  in  institutions,  may  be  traced  to  his 
influence.  Science  was  reborn  by  the  ap- 
peal to  Plato,  and  when  Plato  lived  again, 
Aristotle,  the  genuine  Aristotle,  followed 
Plato  as  in  the  ancient  days.  The  art, 
also,  of  the  age  of  the  Renaissance,  sought 
its  models  in  ancient  art,  imitating  and 
reproducing  until  the  lost  faculty  was  re- 
stored, a  new  creative  art,  with  a  motive 
of  its  own. 

The  Protestant  Reformation  could  not 
have  been  without  this  return  to  the  past, 
for  the  religious  and  moral  awakening  was 
but  the  completion  of  the  process  of  re- 
habilitating a  distant  age.  The  revival  of 
the  study  of  Greek  led  to  the  study  of  the 
New  Testament,  so  that  the  life  of  Christ 
and  the  writings  of  St.  Paul  were  read  in 


1 18  Religious  Progress. 

-the  original  tongue  and  became  once  more 
living  words  to  living  men.  The  avowed 
purpose  of  the  Reformers  was  not  to  cre- 
ate anew,  but  to  restore  the  old.  They 
sought  their  authority,  their  precedents, 
in  the  ancient  Church,  before  the  papacy 
arose.  Such  was  Luther,  who  found  his 
mission  in  advocating  a  lost  or  forgotten 
truth,  not  in  asserting  a  new  truth,  though 
he  made  it  new  by  the  vigor  of  its  repro- 
clamation.  So  Calvin  brought  back  again 
one  phase  of  Augustine's  teaching  which 
the  Middle  Ages  had  practically  rejected. 
In  the  early  Church  also  did  both  Calvin 
and  Luther  seek  their  warrant  for  the 
changes  they  introduced  in  the  ecclesias- 
tical order,  or  in  the  rites  of  worship. 
The  ideal  of  reform  in  the  Church  of  Eng- 
land was  the  constitution  and  worship 
of  the  Church  in  the  age  of  Constantine. 
The  sacred  cause  of  nationality,  which  in- 
spired the  states  of  Europe  to  break  away 
from  the  fold  of  the  Holy  Empire,  was 
fed  by  tfce  reading  of  the  Old  Testament, 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church.      1 19 

which  is  most  truly  regarded  as  the  story 
of  the  life  of  a  nation,  called  of  God,  and 
educated  by  Him  for  its  task.  We  can 
best  understand  Savonarola  as  appearing 
in  the  role  of  a  Hebrew  prophet  repro- 
ducing the  old  prophetic  burden,  as  if  a 
new  message  for  his  beloved  city. 

These  movements  of  religious  reform, 
which  all  alike  appealed  to  the  teaching 
of  the  past,  which  justified  themselves  as 
restorations  and  not  as  new  creations, 
which,  as  it  were,  identified  the  reason 
with  the  voice  of  antiquity,  —  these  move- 
ments which  threatened  to  carry  with  them 
the  world  of  the  time,  at  last  woke  up  the 
Roman  Church  from  its  bewildered  and 
helpless  daze.  We  sometimes  speak  of 
Loyola  as  if  he  had  remade  the  Latin 
Church  into  something  unlike  its  true,  ori- 
ginal self.  But  in  reality  what  he  did  was 
to  reassert  with  a  clearer  intuition  the 
original  mission  of  Latin  Christianity,  put- 
ting the  Church  again  on  its  early  footing 
when  it  began  its  career  in  Western  Eu- 


120  Religious  Progress. 

rope.  If  he  made  innovations,  it  was  in 
the  interest  of  keeping  the  Church  to  the 
original  motive  from  which  it  had  departed, 
seduced  by  the  glamour  of  the  Renais- 
sance. 

There  were  other  voices  in  the  sixteenth 
century,  as  those  of  the  Zwickau  prophets, 
who  hinted  at  new  revelations  communi- 
cated afresh  in  the  soul  of  the  prophet,  not 
to  be  found  in  the  pages  of  the  book ;  but 
these  voices  were  drowned  in  the  unani- 
mous acclaim  which  invoked  the  old  as  its 
authority.  Servetus  perished  because  he 
refused  to  walk  in  the  light  of  his  age,  and 
mistook  the  tendency  which  was  restoring 
the  old,  as  if  it  sought  to  create  anew  by 
the  aid  of  the  individual  reason.  And 
now  from  the  sixteenth  century  to  our  own 
day,  the  same  principle  has  been  avowed 
in  those  religious  movements  which  have 
contributed  to  religious  progress;  how- 
ever much  they  may  have  differed  in  aim 
or  result  they  illustrate  a  tendency  to 
reproduce,  or  they  appeal  to  the  past  for 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church.      121 

their  sanction.     I  cannot  mention  all ;  let 
me  select  a  few  of  the  most  important. 

What  was  known  as  the  Deistic  Move- 
ment in  the  last  century  may  seem  to  us, 
as  it  did  to  the  Christian  apologists  then, 
a  destructive  movement,  rejecting  almost 
every  Christian  truth,  reducing  religion  to 
a  few  essential  principles,  God  and  immor- 
tality and  the  necessity  of  virtue,  what  is 
called  natural  religion.  But  the  leaders  of 
the  movement  felt  the  charm  of  this  same 
motive,  and  they,  too,  professed  to  be 
restoring  Christianity  to  its  original  sim- 
plicity. Christ,  they  said,  had  added  no- 
thing to  the  religion  of  nature ;  He  came 
to  confirm  it,  reproclaiming  it  with  a  deeper 
force  and  insight  ;  —  "  Christianity  was  as 
old  as  the  creation."  Or  take  the  move- 
ment led  by  Wesley  in  opposition  to  De- 
ism, whose  effect  was  to  overcome  its  nega- 
tive, chilling  influence  by  diffusing  the 
glowing  atmosphere  of  an  enthusiastic, 
religious  life.  He,  too,  disclaimed  that  he 
was  an  innovator  bringing  new  truth  to 


/22  Religious  Progress. 

his  age.  More  than  most  men  he  was  in 
bondage  to  the  principle  that  the  higher 
truth  must  be  recalled  from  the  older 
world.  He  began  his  career  with  reviving 
j  usages  that  had  declined  in  the  Church  of 
England.  Then  he  went  back  to  a  period 
in  the  early  Church  when  the  love-feast 
still  survived,  and  sought  through  its  re- 
storation to  secure  that  peculiar  quality  of 
the  religious  life  when  Christians  were 
bound  together  in  the  intimate  ties  of 
brotherly  friendship  and  love.  Although 
Wesley  must  be  regarded  as  one  of  the 
most  striking  figures  in  modern  religious 
history,  he  was  essentially  a  prophet  with 
the  old  burden,  reviving  doctrines  which, 
it  was  commonly  supposed,  had  been  buried 
in  oblivion,  never  again  to  trouble  the 
churches.  One  innovation  he  made  in  the 
ecclesiastical  order,  a  most  startling  inno- 
vation from  the  point  of  view  of  the  Church 
of  England,  when  as  a  presbyter  of  that 
church  he  created  bishops  for  his  followers 
in  America.  But  he  grounded  his  action 


Tbe  Organic  Life  of  the  Church. 

on  what  he  thought  an  ancient  precedent, 
drawn  from  his  reading  of  a  once  famous 
book,  —  Lord  King's  "  Enquiry  into  the 
Constitution  and  Discipline  of  the  Primi- 
tive Church." 

But  of  all  these  religious  appeals  to  the 
authority  of  the  past,  none  has  exceeded 
the  Tractarian  Movement  in  the  scope 
and  intensity  of  its  purpose  to  restore 
what  it  was  pleased  to  call  catholic  an- 
tiquity, in  its  doctrine  and  discipline  and 
ritual.  If  it  has  seemed  to  us  strange 
and  unaccountable  that  such  a  movement 
should  have  been  possible  in  the  nine- 
teenth century,  yet  it  will  not  appear 
quite  so  exceptional  in  its  character  if  we 
associate  it  with  other  movements  in  the 
Church,  such  as  the  Renaissance  of  the 
fourteenth  and  fifteenth  centuries,  which 
not  only  resembled  the  work  of  Pusey 
and  Newman  in  its  aim  to  reproduce  an 
older  and  forgotten  world,  but  resembled 
it  still  more  closely  in  the  enthusiasm, 
and  even  passionate  devotion,  with  which 
it  pursued  its  mission. 


124  Religious  Progress. 

It  is  no  part  of  my  task  to  compare 
these  movements  with  each  other,  or  to 
sit  in  judgment  upon  them,  in  order  to 
determine  the  value  of  the  restorations 
they  have  accomplished.  In  them  all, 
alike,  the  evil  has  been  mingled  with  the 
good,  and  no  one  of  them  is  complete  in 
itself  apart  from  the  others.  But  they 
are  components  of  a  vast  organic  process, 
which,  if  it  is  to  be  interpreted  aright, 
must  be  contemplated  as  a  living  whole. 
Differ  as  they  may,  or  contradictory  as 
they  may  seem,  they  have  a  common  like- 
ness ;  at  least,  they  serve  to  confirm  the 
proposition  which  I  advanced,  that  re- 
ligious progress  seems  to  have  had  a 
backward  gaze,  as  if  the  new  truth  were 
locked  in  the  embrace  of  a  world  which 
is  dead.  It  may  be  with  religion  as  with 
the  animal  or  vegetable  creations,  where 
old  species  may  become  extinct,  but  within 
the  range  of  human  observation  there  has 
not  been  witnessed  the  evolution  of  a 
single  type  which  is  actually  new,  how- 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church.      125 

ever  great  may  be  the  modification  of  the 
old.  It  has  been  a  supreme  character- 
istic of  our  own  age,  and  more  particu- 
larly in  Germany,  since  the  impetus  given 
to  theology  by  Schleiermacher,  that  it  has 
studied  religious  history  with  such  thor- 
oughness and  devotion  as  to  make  the 
past  live  again  before  us,  till  it  has  almost 
become  a  part  of  our  own  experience.  We 
have  learned  to  speak  of  the  Christian  con- 
sciousness as  the  authority  or  ground  of 
certitude  for  our  faith,  and  it  must  be  be- 
cause this  consciousness  may  be  read  and 
interpreted  more  clearly  in  the  past  than 
in  the  multifarious  and  confused  utter- 
ances of  our  own  time,  that  we  turn  to  it 
in  order  to  understand  our  own  place  and 
position  in  history.  And  again,  it  is  the 
peculiar  quality  of  religious  truth,  as  com- 
pared with  scientific  truth,  that  it  has  its 
ground  in  the  heart  as  well  as  in  the  intel- 
lect; and,  therefore,  however  inadequate 
may  be  deemed  the  intellectual  formulas 
of  past  ages,  in  which  it  was  endeavored 


126  Religious  Progress. 

to  translate  into  language  the  aspirations 
and  needs  of  the  soul,  we  must  continue 
to  study  the  old  formulas  as  attesting  the 
immortal  convictions  of  the  soul.  To  con- 
demn or  reject  those  formulas  in  whole- 
sale fashion,  as  not  entitled  to  our  respect 
or  attention,  would  be  like  cutting  off  from 
the  tree  the  bough  on  which  we  are  sit- 
ting, —  the  negation  of  that  consciousness 
which  is  our  highest  spiritual  confidence. 
How  can  we  continue  to  have  faith  in  the 
utterances  of  the  human  soul  to-day,  if 
the  utterance  of  the  past  has  no  endur- 
ing validity?  It  might  almost  seem  as 
if  an  age  like  ours,  given  over  to  critical 
analysis,  and  even  morbid  introspection, 
may  even  be  at  a  disadvantage,  so  far  as 
religious  truth  is  concerned,  compared 
with  the  spontaneity  of  the  ages  before 
us,  when  intellectual  activity  did  not  check 
or  embarrass  the  spiritual  life. 

My  treatment  of  this  vast  subject  would 
be  even  more  fragmentary  than  it  is,  if  I 
did  not  insist,  however  briefly,  upon  one 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church.      727 

point  before  I  conclude  it.  Every  rever- 
sion to  the  past,  every  movement  which 
has  aimed  to  reproduce  some  feature  of  an 
older  life  whether  in  doctrine,  discipline,  C 
or  worship,  has  never  brought  back  again 
exactly  that  for  which  it  went  in  search  or 
sought  to  restore.  It  has  been  found  as 
impossible  accurately  to  imitate  or  repro- 
duce in  the  religious  sphere  as  it  has  been 
in  art  or  literature  or  philosophy  ;  and  we 
must  be  content  to  admire  or  reverence 
the  old  ideals  without  being  able  wholly  to 
appropriate  them,  just  as  we  find  inspira- 
tion in  studying  the  old  monuments  in  art 
or  sculpture  or  architecture  or  literature. 
But  just  as  modern  art  may  be  greater  as 
it  has  drunk  deep  at  the  original  fountain, 
by  study  and  admiration  of  the  old  masters, 
so  is  the  religious  life  of  the  Church  deep- 
ened and  expanded  and  enriched  by  the 
appeal  to  the  past,  by  the  effort  to  restore 
it,  even  if  vain  and  impossible. 

At  this  point  we  touch  the  deep  mystery 
of  our  existence,  that  unknown,  undefinable 


128  Religious  Progress. 

element  which  constitutes  life  or  progress, 
the  inner,  unexplored  range  of  our  being 
which  calls  for  change,  and  incessantly  re- 
peats the  call,  in  order  to  meet  some  exi- 
gency, some  imperative,  unsatisfied  need  of 
the  soul.  This  inward  dissatisfaction  with 
the  present  attainment  which  begets  inces- 
sant change  must  have  its  source  in  Him 
who  made  us  as  we  are,  in  whom  also  we 
live  and  move  and  have  our  being.  We 
may  have  discovered  in  what  we  know  as 
the  law  of  evolution  a  hint  that  some  sim- 
ilar law  may  prevail  in  the  spiritual  world  ; 
but  this  is  as  a  voice  out  of  the  darkness 
compared  to  what  history  reveals  as  already 
known  regarding  the  higher  life  of  man, 
—  that  it  is  a  movement  forward  as  if  to- 
ward completion,  a  development  of  germs 
into  the  flower,  a  persistency  of  ideals,  be- 
getting commotion  and  unrest  in  order  to 
their  fulfillment. 

We  may  not  be  able  to  discern  the  goal 
which  the  movement  of  progress  seeks, 
or  it  may  be  defined  in  different  ways. 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church. 

To  the  eye  of  the  Hebrew  prophets,  the 
vision  expanded,  till  they  saw  the  know- 
ledge of  the  Lord  cover  the  earth  as  the 
waters  cover  the  sea,  the  time  when  men 
shall  no  longer  call  upon  one  another  to 
know  the  Lord,  for  all  shall  know  Him 
from  the  least  unto  the  greatest.  The 
same  strain  has  been  taken  up  by  Christian 
seers,  foretelling  an  age  when  the  kingdoms 
of  this  world  should  become  the  kingdoms 
of  our  Lord  and  of  his  Christ.  Others,  in 
less  hopeful  mood,  have  seen  the  world  as 
reserved  chiefly  for  the  elect,  as  if  the 
world-process  would  have  its  consumma- 
tion in  the  preservation  of  the  faith  even 
unto  the  end ;  as  if  it  would  be  enough  for 
the  fulfillment  of  the  divine  promise,  a  suf- 
ficient justification  of  divine  wisdom,  if 
the  generation  of  God's  children  should 
never  be  wanting  to  hand  on  the  torch  of 
divine  light  and  love,  by  which  the  dark- 
ness of  this  world  is  illuminated.  St. 
Paul  embraced  both  the  lesser  and  the 
larger  hope  ;  for  if  he  endured,  as  he  tells 


Religious  Progress. 

us,  all  things  for  the  sake  of  the  elect,  he 
declares  also  that  we  shall  all  come  by  the 
knowledge  of  the  Son  of  God  unto  the 
stature  of  the  perfect  man,  the  measure  of 
the  stature  of  the  fullness  of  Christ. 

More  than  ever  to-day  does  the  sense  of 
[some  impending  change  in  the  world's 
order  haunt  us  with  its  unknown  possibili- 
ties. What  is  now  becoming  a  current 
phrase,  "  the  end  of  the  century,"  is 
charged  with  our  fears  and  hopes  as  we 
leave  another  age  behind  us  to  enter  upon 
a  new  era  in  history.  For  it  may  be  that 
the  twentieth  century  will  differ  from  the 
nineteenth  century,  as  that  in  turn  has 
differed  from  the  century  which  preceded 
it.  Just  as  we  have  sneered  at  the  eigh- 
teenth century,  making  it  a  butt  of  re- 
proach in  theology  or  in  literature,  the 
coming  age  may  sneer  at  our  favorite  as- 
sumptions, our  shibboleths,  the  watch- 
word so  often  used  but  never  analyzed  or 
defined.  Or  on  the  other  hand  it  may  be 
that  the  next  century  will  follow  out  our 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church.      131 

purpose  to  its  completion,  as  that  great  age 
of  reforms,  the  sixteenth  century,  reduced 
to  practice  the  issues  and  the  hopes  of 
the  long  years  that  went  before.  Will  the 
world  become  tired  at  last  of  incessant 
change  and  threatened  revolution,  and  for 
a  while  demand  rest  or  the  immobility  of 
conservatism  as  if  to  clear  its  vision  or  re- 
cruit its  energies,  or  will  it  gird  itself 
anew  for  greater  changes  and  a  longer 
stride  in  advance  ?  As  to  these  things  no 
one  is  wise  enough  to  prophesy.  Just  at 
present  a  favorite  topic  with  our  students 
and  foremost  thinkers  is  to  sound  the 
depths  of  pessimism  so  powerfully  urged 
by  Leopardi,  Schopenhauer,  Von  Hart- 
mann,  or  Heine,  because  only  an  optimism 
which  has  measured  the  full  extent  of  the 
dark  negation  can  stand  the  test.  We 
must  know  the  worst  that  can  be  said,  if 
we  would  still  retain  our  faith  in  a  higher 
future  for  humanity. 

I  have  dwelt  upon  what  many  may  re- 
gard as  an  unprogressive  and  even  sinister 


Religious  Progress. 

aspect  of  the  Church's  life,  that  tendency 
to  plunge  into  the  past,  as  if  it  would  es- 
cape thereby  the  reality  of  the  present. 
To  me  this  tendency  has  seemed  rather, 
as  if  the  baptism  of  each  new  generation 
into  the  waters  of  life,  and  therefore  the 
ground  of  hope  and  assurance.  I  have 
not  attempted  to  define  progress,  but  rather 
accepted  it  as  the  new  word  of  our  own 
day,  which  carries  in  it  this  special  revela- 
tion of  the  Spirit,  that  life  must  consist  in 
activity  and  change,  directed  by  some  un- 
seen purpose,  whose  end,  however,  which 
as  Wordsworth  said  it  is  our  duty  to  be- 
lieve, is  the  unattainable  perfection  of  man. 
The  Church  progresses  because  it  is  always 
living  down  more  deeply  into  the  past, 
'  bringing  together  in  living  unity,  more 
and  more,  by  the  compromises  of  real  life, 
the  contradictions  which  have  hitherto 
distracted  or  weakened  its  energies. 

IV. 

In  my  first  lecture  I  dwelt  upon  those 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Cburcb. 

motives  or  theories  of  progress  which  are 
followed  by  individuals  as  rules  of  self- 
conscious  guidance  in  the  search  for  re- 
ligious truth.  These  motives  also  con- 
tribute to  the  larger  collective  life  of  the 
Church,  and  by  such  gifts  of  truth  and  in- 
sight the  Church  expands  its  life.  There 
have  been  cases  where  the  fuller  truth  has 
been  first  discerned  and  enforced  by  the 
individual  before  it  was  taken  up  by  the 
Church  and  incorporated  into  its  institu- 
tions, its  creed,  or  ritual.  As  it  has  hap- 
pened before,  it  may  yet  happen  again, 
that  some  heaven-born  man  will  appear  in 
whom  the  universal  experience  can  be 
more  clearly  read  than  in  the  organic  insti- 
tution, whose  mission  it  will  be  to  lead  the 
Church  into  fuller  truth.  When  the  truth 
attained  by  individual  revelation  has  re- 
ceived the  sanction  of  the  Church  it  gains 
a  new  significance,  and  is  disclosed  as  an 
integral  part  of  the  insight  and  experience  1 
of  humanity.  The  universal  Church  which 
thus  grows  from  age  to  age  through  the 


Religions  Progress. 

confluence  of  many  individual  contribu- 
tions as  well  as  by  the  silent  aggregation 
of  elements  whose  origin  cannot  be  traced, 
which  has  also  a  mysterious  life  and  a 
method  of  its  own  for  the  acquirement  of 
truth,  —  this  universal  Church  is  larger 
than  the  individual,  and  demands  of  him 
that  he  should  enter  this  wider  field  of 
religious  thought  and  experience  as  if  it 
were  his  own  heritage,  to  be  made  increas- 
ingly his  own  by  the  power  of  private 
judgment,  but  his  own,  nevertheless,  while 
he  is  still  unable  to  appreciate  the  richness 
of  his  possession. 

And  in  order  that  the  individual  may 
appropriate  his  own,  he  only  needs  to  be 
alive  in  himself,  full  of  faith  in  God  and 
man.  Then  it  will  dawn  upon  him  that 
the  history  of  the  Church  in  all  its  diverse 
movements  is  but  his  own  enlarged  bio- 
graphy. The  individual  must  come  to  the 
knowledge  of  himself,  not  merely  through 
his  own  experience  but  through  the  know- 
ledge of  what  others  than  himself,  and  in 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Cburcb. 

other  ages  than  his  own,  have  thought  and 
done  and  suffered.  "  If  we  were  more 
alive,"  said  the  late  Mr.  Maurice,  "  more 
alive  and  more  interested  in  all  the  things 
that  are  passing  around  us,  in  all  that  we 
and  other  men  have  to  do  and  suffer,  the 
history  of  past  times  would  be  infinitely 
more  clear  to  us.  At  any  rate,  that  is  the 
way  we  must  get  to  know  anything  about 
it."  This  process  of  enlarging  one's  own 
view,  or  enriching  one's  own  experience 
by  the  life  and  thought  of  the  past,  is 
inexhaustible.  We  may  sometimes  fear 
that  a  limit  must  come  to  the  wealth  which 
can  be  brought  us  by  the  interpretation  of 
the  past,  as  if  there  would  be  nothing  to 
do  for  those  who  come  after  us  but  to 
repeat  the  process  in  dreary  repetition. 
But  the  interest  of  life  is  not  in  the  things 
that  happen,  but  in  the  men  who  are  alive  \ 
and  able  to  see.  To  the  ever  new  man, 
the  old  world  will  be  forever  new.  Com- 
mon and  familiar  things  will  shine  with  a 
new  light.  As  there  may  be  no  limit  to 


136  Religious  Progress. 

the  wonders  of  scientific  discovery,  so  the 
relations  which  may  exist  between  the 
world  and  the  soul  of  the  man  who  is  ever 
growing  in  faith  and  spiritual  imagination 
are  practically  without  limit,  and  so  the 
everlasting  interest  of  life,  the  perpetual 
progress  of  humanity,  is  sure. 

Even  now  there  has  begun  another  re- 
turn to  the  past,  the  return  to  Christ  Him- 
self for  which  all  previous  movements  have 
been  preparing  the  way.  Each  successive 
revival  of  Church  life,  which  has  drawn 
inspiration  by  reverting  to  the  earlier  ages 
of  Christian  history,  has  been  forcing  us 
back  to  Him  in  whom  they  took  their  ori- 
gin. How  many  efforts  to  retell  the  story 
of  his  life  have  been  made  in  our  own  gen- 
eration, while  the  conviction  grows  that  it 
has  not  yet  been  told,  that  the  "  Life  of 
Christ "  must  always  remain  to  be  written. 
In  this  lies  our  hope  that  Christ  is  begin- 
ning to  live  in  the  modern  Church  as  He 
has  not  yet  lived  since  He  first  walked  the 
earth  in  human  form.  In  the  power  of  his 


The  Organic  Life  of  the  Church. 

life,  we  may  trust  that  the  religious  differ- 
ences which  now  distinguish  will  no  longer 
divide  or  separate  us.  Our  theological 
differences  we  may  still  cherish  as  an 
inheritance  from  the  past,  or  as  so  many 
diverse  means  by  which  differing  person- 
alities grasp  and  retain  the  central,  com- 
mon truth.  When  we  discern  the  true 
value  of  our  differences,  while  we  shall 
hold  them  more  firmly,  we  shall  also  more  ( 
easily  subordinate  them  to  the  higher 
virtue  of  Christian  charity.  In  this  way 
the  unity  of  the  Church,  which  has  not  to 
be  anew  created  but  which  really  exists 
already,  may  find  what  is  also  sorely 
needed,  some  common  mode  of  manifesta- 
tion to  the  world. 


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NOV    7    1947  27Apr'50AP 


APR  7     1948 


APR  2  ')  J956 


., 


JUL9   1957 

•MDCT63RY 

LD 

6 '64 


21 


_lOOm-12,'46(A2012sl6)4120 


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